Metatranslation: Essays on Translation and Translation Studies [1 ed.] 0367819589, 9780367819583

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Sources and Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1 Approaches
Chapter 1 Translation’s Other [1996]
Chapter 2 Paradoxes and Aporias in Translation and Translation Studies [2002]
Chapter 3 Translation, Irritation and Resonance [2007]
Chapter 4 What is Translation? [2013]
Chapter 5 Untranslatability, Entanglement and Understanding [2019]
Part 2 Concepts
Chapter 6 Translational Norms and Correct Translations [1991]
Chapter 7 Translation and Normativity [1998]
Chapter 8 The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative [1996]
Chapter 9 The Translator as Evaluator [2010]
Chapter 10 Positioning Translators: Voices, Views and Values in Translation [2014]
Part 3 Histories
Chapter 11 Images of Translation: Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation [1985]
Chapter 12 The Task of the Translator in the European Renaissance: Explorations in a Discursive Field [1997]
Chapter 13 Miracles in Translation: Justus Lipsius, Our Lady of Halle and Two Dutch Translations [2015]
Chapter 14 Schleiermacher [2019]
Index

Citation preview

METATRANSLATION

Metatranslation presents a selection of 14 key essays by leading theorist, Theo Hermans, covering a span of almost 40 years. The essays trace Hermans’ work and demonstrate how translation studies has evolved from the 1980s into the much more diverse and self-reflexive discipline it is today. The book is divided into three main sections: the first section explores the status and central concerns of translation studies, including the growing interest in sociological, ideological and ethical approaches to translation; the second section investigates the key concepts of translation norms and of the translator’s presence, or positioning, in translated texts; the historical essays in the final section are concerned with both modern and early modern discourses on translation and with the use of translation as an instrument of war and propaganda. This synthesis of the work of a highly influential pioneer in translation studies is essential reading for researchers, scholars and advanced students of translation studies, intercultural studies and comparative literature. Theo Hermans is Emeritus Professor in the Centre for Translation Studies at University College London (UCL). His monographs include Translation in Systems (1999; reissued as a Routledge Translation classic in 2020), The Conference of the Tongues (2007) and Translation and History (2022).

Key Thinkers on Translation

This series presents the essential selected works – journal articles and book extracts – of the leading figures in the field of translation studies in a single manageable volume. With a general introduction and section introductions contextualising the work, readers can follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the development of the field itself. Researching Translation in the Age of Technology and Global Conflict Selected Works of Mona Baker Edited by Kyung Hye Kim and Yifan Zhu Translation, Semiotics, and Feminism Selected Writings of Barbara Godard Edited by Eva C. Karpinski and Elena Basile Metatranslation Essays on Translation and Translation Studies Theo Hermans For more information about this series, please visit: https://www​.routledge​.com​ /Key​-Thinkers​-on​-Translation​/book​-series​/KTOT

METATRANSLATION Essays on Translation and Translation Studies

Theo Hermans

Designed cover image: © ‘Lines of Communication’ by Sandra Lynn (Dacorum Creatives) First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Theo Hermans The right of Theo Hermans to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hermans, Theo, author. Title: Metatranslation: essays on translation and translation studies/Theo Hermans. Description: First edition. | Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Key thinkers on translation | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022055600 | ISBN 9780367819583 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367819590 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003011033 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P306 .H436 2023 | DDC 418/.02—dc23/eng/20230307 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055600 ISBN: 978-0-367-81958-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-81959-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01103-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033 Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

Sources and Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction 1 PART 1 APPROACHES 13

1 Translation’s Other [1996]

15

2 Paradoxes and Aporias in Translation and Translation Studies [2002]

35

3 Translation, Irritation and Resonance [2007]

48

4 What is Translation? [2013]

65

5 Untranslatability, Entanglement and Understanding [2019]

81

PART 2 CONCEPTS 95

6 Translational Norms and Correct Translations [1991] 7 Translation and Normativity [1998]

97 109 

vi  Contents

8 The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative [1996]

129

9 The Translator as Evaluator [2010]

150

10 Positioning Translators: Voices, Views and Values in Translation [2014]

163

PART 3 HISTORIES 181

11 Images of Translation: Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation [1985]

183

12 The Task of the Translator in the European Renaissance: Explorations in a Discursive Field [1997]

210

13 Miracles in Translation: Justus Lipsius, Our Lady of Halle and Two Dutch Translations [2015]

232

14 Schleiermacher [2019]

253

Index 273

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

‘Translation’s Other’ was delivered as an inaugural lecture at University College London (UCL) on 19 March 1996. An Open Access version is available online via the UCL Discovery site: https://discovery​.ucl​.ac​.uk​/id​/eprint​/198. ‘Paradoxes and Aporias in Translation and Translation Studies’ was first published in Translation Studies. Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, edited by Alessandra Riccardi, 10–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0 521 81731 5. Reprinted by kind permission of Cambridge University Press. ‘Translation, Irritation and Resonance’ was first published in Constructing a Sociology of Translation, edited by Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari, 57–75. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2007. ISBN 978 90 272 1682 3. Reprinted by kind permission of John Benjamins Publishing Company. ‘What Is Translation?’ was first published as ‘What Is (Not) Translation?’ in The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by Carmen Millán and Francesca Bartrina, 75–87. London & New York: Routledge, 2013. ISBN 978 0 415 55967 6 (hbk), 978 0 203 10289 3 (ebk). Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge. ‘Untranslatability, Entanglement and Understanding’ was first published in Untranslatability. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Duncan Large, Motoko Akashi, Wanda Józwikowska and Emily Rose, 27–40. New York & London: Routledge. ISBN 978 1 138 08257. Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge. ‘Translational Norms and Correct Translations’ was first published in Translation Studies. The State of the Art, edited by Kitty van Leuven-Zwart and Ton Naaijkens, 155–169. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1991. ISBN 90 5183 257 5. Reprinted by kind permission of Brill Publishers. 

viii Sources and Acknowledgements

‘Translation and Normativity’ was first published in Current Issues in Language and Society 5 (1998), 1–2, 51–72. ISSN 13520520. It also appeared in Translation and Norms, edited by Christina Schäffner, 50–71. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1999. ISBN 1 85359 438 5. Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge. ‘The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative’ was first published in Target 8 (1996), 1, 23–48. ISSN 0924 1884. It was reprinted in Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 193–212. London & New York: Routledge, 2010. ISBN 978 0 415 46955 5. Reprinted by kind permission of John Benjamins Publishing Company. ‘The Translator as Evaluator’ was first published in Text and Context. Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason, edited by Mona Baker, Maeve Olohan and María Calzada Pérez, 63–76. Manchester & Kinderhook (NY): St Jerome Publishing, 2010. ISBN 978 1 905763 25 2. Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge. ‘Positioning Translators. Voices, Views and Values in Translation’ was first published in Language and Literature 23 (2014), 3, 285–301. DOI: 10.1177/0963947014536508. Reprinted by kind permission of Sage Publishers. ‘Images of Translation. Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation’ was first published in The Manipulation of Literature, edited by Theo Hermans, 103–135. London & Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985. ISBN 0 7099 1276 5. Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge. ‘The Task of the Translator in the European Renaissance. Explorations in a Discursive Field’ was first published in Translating Literature. Essays and Studies, edited by Susan Bassnett, 14–40. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. ISBN 0 85991 522 0. Essays and Studies is a publication of the English Association (www​.englishassociation​.ac​.uk). © The English Association 1997. All rights reserved. ‘Miracles in Translation. Justus Lipsius, Our Lady of Halle and Two Dutch Translations’ was first published as ‘Miracles in Translation. Lipsius, Our Lady of Halle and Two Dutch Translations’ in the theme issue ‘Translation and Print Culture in Early Modern Europe’, edited by Brenda Hosington, of Renaissance Studies 29 (2015), 1, 125–142. DOI: 10.1111/rest. 12117. Reprinted by kind permission of John Wiley & Sons. ‘Schleiermacher’ was first published in The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, edited by Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson, 17–33. London & New York: Routledge, 2019. ISBN 978 1 138 93355 2 (hbk), 978 1 3156 7848 1 (ebk). Reprinted by kind permission of Routledge. I want to thank Kathryn Batchelor for gently urging this collection on me, Lucelle Pardoe for kindly converting files, and Talitha Duncan-Todd for eminently useful advice on copyright issues.

INTRODUCTION

It’s what we take for granted that gives us away. Like most of those who elaborated or adopted the descriptive paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s, I came to translation studies via literary studies, more especially comparative literature. A great deal of comparative literary study at the time was concerned with abstract questions of influence or typological similarities. The study of translation, it seemed to me, offered the prospect of concrete comparisons of individual texts – a definite bonus. The first essay I ever published (1979; not in this collection), composed when I was finishing my PhD, explored the convergence between poetry translations and principles of poetic writing in European Modernism around the First World War. Several other essays written in the 1980s (including two reprinted here: the historical ‘Images of Translation’, 1985, and the more theoretical ‘Translational Norms and Correct Translations’, 1991) were wholly in line with the descriptivist paradigm that was gaining currency at the time. In hindsight, the presuppositions underpinning these early pieces are clear enough. Translation meant, almost exclusively, literary translation. Languages were discrete and homogenous entities tied to national traditions, and different national traditions existed alongside each other. The material and social conditions of cultural production were of marginal interest. Translation, as such, was not a problem; it was a matter of documenting how it was done and what was said about it. Research was of the order of an inventory. The standpoint from which translation was viewed remained external to the world of translation itself; as observers, we regarded what translators did as ‘behaviour’, in the way biologists might study animal behaviour. This is not to diminish the novelty or the achievements of the descriptive paradigm. Its diagnostic stance broke decisively with prescriptive approaches. Its relaxed understanding of translation, as that which happens to be called translation, sidestepped problems of definition. Its privileging of the target text made DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-1

2  Introduction

the relation with the original just one among several factors to be considered in explaining the shape of individual translations. It pushed concepts such as norms and systems so as to situate translations in wider cultural environments. It took researchers coming from other directions or working in other traditions to bring to light the blind spots that we descriptivists did not see. Feminist and postcolonial scholars, for instance, highlighted the descriptivist myopia regarding power differentials. Lawrence Venuti insisted on writing as both a translator and an academic, and he wanted to change the way literary translation (into English) was done. Ethnography in the 1980s was shaken up by the ‘Writing Culture’ debate (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). It questioned the role of the ethnographer who went to live in a local community as a ‘participant observer’ but who would eventually translate his or her findings into a metropolitan disciplinary idiom. The debate turned on issues of representation and objectivity, and it trailed conceptual, political and ethical aspects in its wake. Most disturbing, in my own case, was a criticism launched from a deconstructive angle that dislodged a central plank in the descriptive edifice. In a couple of essays, Matthijs Bakker showed how the study of translation cannot avoid translating into its own terms that which it studies (Bakker and Naaijkens 1991; Bakker 1995). This entanglement meant that the observer could not stand outside the thing being observed and that the neat separation between objectlevel and meta-level, which the descriptivist paradigm had taken for granted, was untenable. As a consequence, a more circumspect and self-reflexive way of speaking about translation would need to be found. The first two essays in Part 1 of the present collection bear witness to the shift in orientation from the relative certainties of the descriptive paradigm to a more unsettled view of translation. From then onward, translation has continued to grow in complexity. ‘Translation’s Other’ (1996) is the text of the inaugural lecture I delivered on 19 March 1996, shortly after University College London (UCL) made me professor of Dutch and Comparative Literature. It speaks to two constituencies: students of translation and students of Dutch. The main issues at stake concern translation, especially the untidy ‘other’ of translation. The lecture opens with the common metaphorical descriptions of translation. One set of images (translation as bridge-building, as ferrying across, as providing access) points to the function of translation as a problem-solving device, enabling understanding across an intelligibility barrier. This is the why of translation. A second set of metaphors indicates how this enabling is done: by providing a replica, a transparent likeness, a simulation that makes the translation ‘as good as’ the original. The argument presented in the lecture is that this conceptualisation conceals an ‘other’, a messier side that has to do with hybridity and plurality. For a start, the common conceptualisation of translation has no room for the translator. It requires the translator’s non-interference, effectively his or her erasure as an active agent in the process. Once the translator is written into the equation,

Introduction  3

the presumed equivalence between translation and original becomes strained because additional values enter the picture. The lecture looks for situations that oblige translators to make their presence felt in their translations, preventing us from reading the translated texts as diaphanous representations. Cases like these show that translation is more complex than the standard metaphors would have us believe. They lead to the recognition that the concept of translation is not an immanent given but a historical and culture-bound construct. In addition, they suggest that translation may be seen as symptomatic of the way a community positions itself with respect to the world around it and, hence, as an index of cultural self-reference and self-definition. Like its predecessor, ‘Paradoxes and Aporias in Translation and Translation Studies’ (2002) questions the common perception of translation, but it musters different arguments to demonstrate the complexity of translation. It points to retranslations as activating intertextual links not just with an original but also, often polemically, with one or more previous translations, generating translation-specific intertextual chains. It argues that translation norms can be seen as cultural filters that aid a historical and cross-cultural understanding of translation. At the same time, the realisation that in describing translation we are also translating translation invites a look at how historians and ethnographers are entangled in their respective objects of study and engage with translation as they render alien beliefs and practices into their own language and disciplinary concepts. Historians and ethnographers have developed an acute awareness of their procedures and methodologies, and this could benefit the critical selfreflexiveness of translation studies. ‘Translation, Irritation and Resonance’ (2007) was written at the time when I was also preparing The Conference of the Tongues (2007) and echoes some of the chapters in that book. It begins by suggesting that the translation-specific kind of intertextuality mentioned in the previous essay can be understood more broadly as stretching into the future as well as the past. Because a translation is never the definitive or the only possible rendering of the original it represents, it echoes existing ways of rendering that original or others like it. And because a translation can always be attempted again, each individual translation potentialises alternative renderings and temporalises available choices that were excluded on this occasion. An approach along these lines invites a description of translation in terms of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems. This may seem like a long shot. Luhmann’s sociological theory is grand and abstract; it is not primarily concerned with cultural things and refuses to put human agents at its centre. Still, there are obvious points of entry. Luhmann’s key term throughout his work is communication, and translation is eminently about communication. His understanding of social norms as shared expectations chimed with the way several translation researchers, including myself, had come to view translation norms. His notion of second-order observation fed into the questioning of presuppositions that the cross-cultural study of translation had been promoting. And Luhmann built,

4  Introduction

at least in part, on the general systems theory that a translation scholar such as André Lefevere had also been exploring in the 1980s (Lefevere 1992, 11–12; Hermans 1999, 125). There was also the sheer challenge of making Luhmann’s imposing theoretical edifice serviceable for the world of translation. The benefit of the exercise, I suppose, is that, at a time when many translation scholars opted for Pierre Bourdieu and, soon after that, for actor-network theory, Luhmann provided an alternative way to think about translation as a social and historical phenomenon. If nothing else, the social systems perspective adds depth to our understanding of what translation is and does. Probably the most general essay in the present collection, ‘What Is Translation?’ (2013), amounts to a summing up. It recognises that a formal definition of translation remains out of reach but that it may be possible to understand translation, in a broad sense, as mediating difference by means of similarity. Any more concrete assumptions, of the kind proposed by a descriptivist such as Gideon Toury, turn out to be questionable. Another possible approach takes its cue form literary studies, in which ‘literature’ is regarded as a mere label around which historically and culturally contingent features have accrued. Prototype theory, as proposed by Sandra Halverson, offers another possibility. It has, in turn, been criticised by Maria Tymoczko, who has suggested treating translation as a cluster concept – a movable feast that sends the researcher on an open-ended quest for family resemblances across cultural borders. The upshot of the essay is that we cannot define translation and neither do we have reliable means to negotiate the limits of whatever we mean by ‘translation’ or a term in another language that we may want to translate as ‘translation’. This indeterminacy is not a bad thing at all. It shows that studying translation generally, historically or in cross-cultural contexts, requires methodological caution and an open mind. ‘Untranslatability, Entanglement and Understanding’ (2019) addresses what may be thought of as translation’s shadow. The issue of untranslatability had come to the fore in the wake of the debates surrounding the concept of world literature (Prendergast 2004; Apter 2013) and the appearance of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014). In these debates, the untranslatable was understood as that which resists translation because successive attempts continue to fall short of the mark. The Dictionary of Untranslatables, despite its volume and detail, perpetuated the old rhetoric about the insufficiencies of translation. Lawrence Venuti voiced searing criticism of it (2016; 2019, 54–65), and I can only agree. My essay argues that translations are conditioned by circumstances and that, in generating correspondences, translators produce interpretations and renderings that are valid within the context in which they are produced. There is no external, detached position from which to assess what a text means or how it should be rendered into another tongue. Translations remain provisional, however, because they are not definitive and can always be done again differently. Where Barbara Cassin takes the untranslatable to be that which ‘one keeps on (not) translating’ (2014, xvii), I would discard the negative and assert that untranslatability is merely the repeatability of translation.

Introduction  5

That does not mean translation is easy. The more we view individual languages as particular ways of conceptualising and articulating the world, the less we will be inclined to assume the possibility of synonymy across languages and the harder translation will be. In his 1813 lecture on translation, Friedrich Schleiermacher went a long way in this direction, even though he shied away from confronting untranslatability head-on. Still, it stalks his lecture, just as it continues to affect contemporary thinking about translation. The five essays in Part 2 are centred on two concepts. The first two essays in this part deal with the concept of norms of translation; the next three all concern the idea of the discursive presence of translators in their translations. Both concepts can be seen to grow in complexity as they are explored in greater depth. ‘Translational Norms and Correct Translations’ (1991), a paper presented at the First James S Holmes Symposium in Amsterdam in December 1990, sought to strengthen the theoretical underpinning of the concept of translation norms that Gideon Toury, building on structuralist thinkers before him, had introduced into translation studies. The essay still adheres to descriptivist tenets. The basic idea is that, if norms offer a useful tool to analyse the production and reception of translations, it is worth delving deeper into the concept. The theoretical elaboration draws on the philosopher David Lewis’s understanding of conventions and on the notion of self-regulating systems. Distinguishing between a norm’s regulatory force and the notion of correctness that makes up its content means that the cultural and ideological values held in place by norms can be made visible. This, in turn, anchors translation as a social practice. The essay reaches a relativistic conclusion: correct translations are translations accepted as correct because they comply with the norms prevalent in a certain community at a certain time. For all that, the insistence on separating the norms that apply to translators from those that apply to academic researchers reveals the essay’s descriptive and empirical bias. That stance became problematic when, soon after the paper appeared in print, I had to come to terms with the realisation that, in studying translation, we are also translating translation, and if translation is governed by norms, then the study of translation is norm-governed as well. This uneasy change of perspective is reflected in the second essay on norms. A good deal of work on translation norms was done in the 1990s by researchers such as Dirk de Geest (1992), Andreas Poltermann (1992) and Andrew Chesterman (1993, 1997). It brought into focus the combination of psychological and social aspects of norms, their positive and negative loads ranging from rewards and obligations to sanctions and prohibitions and the interplay between personal alignments and shared expectations. ‘Translation and Normativity’ (1998) takes these developments into account. It finds succour in Niklas Luhmann’s notion of mutual expectations as forming the structure of social systems and his treatment of choices as selections that potentialise the options that are excluded but remain available. The essay applies these ideas to a single historical case. This runs a risk: the approach to an isolated translation by means of the concept of norms has trouble figuring out whether the translator’s decisions resulted from

6  Introduction

the pressure of norms, from goal-oriented calculation or a mixture of both. Still, the key insight that norms secure values implies the recognition that translation cannot be value-free. This, in turn, prompts a view of translation as an index of cultural self-definition, an unwillingness to accept that translation establishes relations of equivalence and curiosity as to why equivalence has played such a large part in Western understandings of translation. The essay’s conclusion returns to the vexed notion of translation studies being entangled in their own object of study because they have to perform the very action they are meant to analyse. We cannot escape this entanglement, but we may be able to learn from disciplines such as ethnography and historiography that likewise have to translate their object of study into their own disciplinary language. Thinking about translation through the prism of the norms concept foregrounds the translator as a decision-making agent. In one of his essays, the sixteenth-century French writer Michel de Montaigne spoke of ‘les erreurs de Wyclef ’ (Wycliffe’s errors), which his first English translator, John Florio, toned down to ‘Wickliff’s opinions’, a deliberate choice revealing the translator’s value judgement, but one that is detectable only by a reader with access to Montaigne’s French. When, in another essay, Montaigne referred to ‘le Louvre’, and Florio helpfully expanded the reference to ‘the Louvre, the palace of our Kings’, something else happened, a sudden anomaly opening up: if this was Montaigne speaking, the addition was pointless because he was a French writer and his French readers knew perfectly well that the Louvre was the royal palace. If it was the English translator uttering the explanatory phrase, calling the French king ‘our’ king was annoying as well as incorrect (Matthiessen 1931, 135, 139). Or was the translator asking English readers to imagine a French author addressing them in English while remaining French? Exactly who was speaking to whom when the translation said that the Louvre was ‘the palace of our Kings’? ‘The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative’ (1996) is based on the assumption that the translator redirects an original to a new audience in another language and that this intervention is bound to leave traces in the translated text. Often, the traces are covered up. But every now and then, they can be identified, allowing us to detect the translator’s subject-position, or voice, in translated texts. The essay restricts itself to narrative texts because narratological models have invested heavily in distinguishing voices and viewpoints, albeit without differentiating between originals and translations. My own piece in 1996 was written alongside an article by Giuliana Schiavi, who explored the same issue from a theoretical angle. She took on the more difficult and unrewarding task of engaging with structuralist mappings of narrative and devising a way to give the translator a place in them. I focused on a practical case study that highlighted instances of translators being obliged to intervene directly in their texts, interrupting the flow of the narrative. I identified three kinds of instances requiring paratextual intervention: when the displacement that translation brings about threatens effective communication, when the narrative thematises its own linguistic medium of expression and when specific

Introduction  7

textual choices are so overdetermined as to defy translation or transposition. The broader claim is that, if there are individual cases forcing translators to show their hand in their translations, all translations can be said to contain the translator as a co-producer of the discourse we are reading. Translators may make themselves so discreet as to be practically untraceable, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there. In ‘The Translator as Evaluator’ (2010), I tried to take the matter further by exploring several different ways to discern, or tease out, the translator’s presence in translated texts. The question was: how can we, as recipients, become aware of this presence without falling back on a comparison between translation and original? Most translations are meant to be read by themselves. What we read are the translator’s words. It must be possible to devise ways that enable us to spot that translator’s footprint, fingerprint or signature in the text. The form itself of a translation, as the deliberate choice of one mode of representation against the background of alternative options, might be one way, especially as different renderings of the same original can exist side by side, and new translations may echo or disown older versions. Viewing translation as reported speech is another because the reporting speech affects the words being reported. Modality or modulation is yet another way, equally reliant on the interaction between a translation and the paratexts surrounding it. The issue is taken up again, from a different angle and using a somewhat different model, in ‘Positioning Translators’ (2014). The model conceives of translation as a form of reported speech, typically direct speech or quotation, and had been explored initially in The Conference of the Tongues (Hermans 2007, 52–85). ‘Positioning Translators’ starts from translations that are accompanied by paratexts in which translators express reservations about the works they are translating. Because the paratextual frame affects our reading of the translation itself, the communication between translator and audience becomes multilayered. The translation does more than represent the original; it has the translator’s attitude inscribed in it as well. Dorrit Cohn’s notion of discordant narration proves helpful here. A discordant narration is a story in which an author fields a narrator who articulates ideas and values that the author evidently does not share. Although the only words reaching the audience are the narrator’s, the discrepancy between the views expressed by the narrator and those we attribute to the author invites a sceptical or ironic reading of the narrator’s words. Discordant translation shows the same structure as discordant narration, with the difference that in discordant narration only the narrator is heard but in discordant translation the translator’s views are voiced in the paratexts framing the translation. Most translations, of course, are not discordant. Translators may signal enthusiasm about the texts they translate, or studied neutrality, or they may not signal anything in particular. Viewing translation as reported speech, however, lets us appreciate that translation is necessarily framed. Reported speech requires a reporting speech. This is the translation’s paratextual frame, in which the translator communicates with the recipient about the translated words. Even if the

8  Introduction

frame is reduced to the point of being merely implied, it is still there, and it carries values inasmuch as it contains, or implies, the translator’s attitude toward what is being translated. It is up to the audience to recognise the attitude and make it relevant to the translation itself. In this respect, the model of translation presented here is in line with postclassic approaches to narrative, which have largely replaced the neat diagrams of old with an emphasis on the active role of the reader. The four essays in Part 3 may appear different because they deal with historical topics, but they follow the same pattern as the previous two parts in moving from the relative comfort of the descriptive paradigm to increased complexity. The first two essays in this part concern the early modern discourse on translation in Western Europe. The third, also located in early modern times, is about two near-identical translations on opposite sides of a violent conflict. The fourth and final essay proposes a revisionist reading of a text often regarded as ushering in modern translation theory. If the central argument in ‘Images of Translation’ (1985) remains understated, this is in line with a descriptive outlook that favoured the accumulation of data over interpretation and debate. But there is a central argument. It claims that the early modern theory of translation, dispersed across an array of liminary texts, is comprised of the imagery and metaphors deployed in these prefaces, dedications and commendatory verses. The metaphors are the theory. As a result, the essay is intent on discerning patterns, clusters of metaphors and their positive or negative loads. The liminary texts display a rhetoric of their own, marked by self-deprecation in the translator’s own statements and hyperbolic praise in the laudatory verses contributed by friends. The images and metaphors are varied and colourful, and they serve a multiplicity of purposes, from the inferiority of a translation vis-àvis its original to the proud legitimation of the translator’s undertaking. In hindsight, the essay would have benefited from a more adequate appreciation of the overarching concept of imitation (in this respect, for me, Jansen 2008 remains the authoritative study) and, perhaps, from broader contextualisation of individual statements, but overall, the inventory, and the patterns it reveals, still seem relevant. In addition, an encounter with the historical metalanguage of translation may trigger reflection on contemporary disciplinary jargons. ‘The Task of the Translator in the European Renaissance’ (1997) is in the same vein as the previous essay. Tracking a cluster of terms and concepts centred on what constitutes the task, the office, the responsibility or the duty of the translator or the law of translation in the sixteenth century, it finds that literalism made up the utopian core of the concept of translation at the time. The essay explores the practical and conceptual ramifications of this idea. While linguistic differences militate against strict literalism, the word-for-word principle offers protection against charges of distortion or misinterpretation. The picture is not uniform, and the literalist temper did not go unchallenged. Humanist circles insisted on the need for stylistic quality over and above linguistic accuracy. There

Introduction  9

were temporal and social dimensions, too. The seventeenth-century ‘libertine’ translators, who hailed mostly from elite circles, adopted the humanist insistence on style in their own vernacular translations. As they gained prominence, literalism was pushed to the margins. In a sense, ‘Miracles in Translation’ (2015) is about the margins as well: a decidedly minor Latin original flanked by two unremarkable Dutch translations published in the Low Countries in the early seventeenth century. But appearances are deceptive. The case acquires significance due to the military, political and ideological conflict surrounding it. All the documents involved, from the partisan original to its two mutually hostile translations and the further polemics that flared up in their wake, were intended as interventions in a propaganda war that was, in a very literal sense, tearing the region apart and, beyond that, pitted Catholic against Protestant Europe. That conflict takes centre stage, and the job consists in figuring out, as accurately as the historical record permits, how the primary texts relate to it. The paratexts accompanying the translations, it turns out, do most of the heavy lifting. As it happens, the primary texts also afford the occasional peek into the private world of both the original author and of his translators across the centuries. These glimpses are fortuitous, and in other respects, we have to reckon with the vagaries of the historical record. But they are a reminder that, every so often, historical research has surprises in store. Context is also what enables the revisionist approach in ‘Schleiermacher’ (2019), a rereading of his 1813 lecture on the different methods of translating. I had outlined this approach a few years earlier in an essay that highlighted Schleiermacher’s translation of Plato alongside his writings on hermeneutics (Hermans 2015). The present essay is more comprehensive in that it draws on Schleiermacher’s writings on ethics, dialectics and psychology as well as those on theology and hermeneutics. The argument remains the same. To my mind, and contrary to the common perception, Schleiermacher’s lecture does not present a choice between two equally valid ways of translating, and when he speaks of bringing the reader to the author, all he means is that the reader is made to occupy the same position as the translator who has moved toward the outer edge of the translating language but not beyond it. In bringing Schleiermacher’s Plato translation as well as his voluminous writings on other subjects to bear on this reading, the essay seeks to demonstrate the value of a contextualised reading of historical documents about translation, as recommended in Translation and History (Hermans 2022). A few final remarks: the 14 essays in this book were originally published between 1985 and 2019, a period of some 35 years. If I am right in thinking that, collectively, they show a steady increase in complexity, then this trajectory would seem to mirror the growth in complexity of translation studies more generally. It is not just that new forms of translation in an interconnected, digital and multimedia world have called for new approaches, concepts and research methods but that the questions themselves have become both more diverse and

10 

Introduction

more sophisticated. While translation studies have always, of necessity, crossed cultural boundaries, the global context of contemporary research has intensified the transcultural dimension. This global span remains largely absent from the present collection because, for better or worse, my knowledge base is rooted in Western Europe. That does not mean I am unaware of the wider world, and I hope that the range and detail of the two-volume collection Translating Others (Hermans 2006) can testify to this. I like to believe that, as regards my own itinerary, such as it is, the key passage has been that from ‘Translation’s Other’ to Translating Others, the rest of the journey being primarily a matter of looking out and digging in. As for the texts in the following pages, I have occasionally tinkered with the phrasing for stylistic reasons or to bring greater clarity. These minor adjustments have not affected the structure, tone or argument of the original pieces. There are several repetitions and overlaps across essays, reflecting my tendency to fall back on key ideas and examples in different contexts. The repetitions will annoy some, but I trust not many will set out to read the book from cover to cover.

Bibliography Apter, Emily. 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London & New York: Verso. Bakker, Matthijs. 1995. ‘Metasprong en wetenschap: Een kwestie van discipline’. In Vertalen historisch bezien. Tekst, metatekst, theorie, edited by Dirk Delabastita & Theo Hermans, 141–62. The Hague: Stichting Bibliographia Neerlandica. Bakker, Matthijs and Ton Naaijkens. 1991. ‘A Postscript: Fans of Holmes’. In Translation Studies: The State of the Art, edited by Kitty van Leuven-Zwart and Ton Naaijkens, 193–208. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi. Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation. The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Chesterman, Andrew. 1993. ‘From “Is” to “Ought”: Laws, Norms and Strategies in Translation Studies’. Target 5, 1–20. Clifford, James and George Marcus, ed. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Representation. Berkeley & London: University of California Press. De Geest, Dirk. 1992. ‘The Notion of “System”: Its Theoretical Importance and its Methodological Implications for a Functionalist Translation Theory’. In Geschichte, System, Literarische Übersetzung. Histories, Systems, Literary Translations, edited by Harald Kittel, 32–45. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Hermans, Theo. 1979. ‘Translation, Comparison, Diachrony’. Comparison 9, 58–91. Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translation in Systems: Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained. London & New York: Routledge. Hermans, Theo, ed. 2006. Translating Others. 2 vols. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Hermans, Theo. 2007. The Conference of the Tongues. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Hermans, Theo. 2015. ‘Schleiermacher and Plato, Hermeneutics and Translation’. In Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Problem of Translation, edited by Larisa Cercel and Adriana Şerban, 77–106. Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter.

Introduction  11

Hermans, Theo. 2022. Translation and History: A Textbook. London & New York: Routledge. Jansen, Jeroen. 2008. Imitatio. Literaire navolging (imitatio auctorum) in the Europese letterkunde van de renaissance (1500–1700). Hilversum: Verloren. Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London & New York: Routledge. Marcus, George and Michael Fischer, ed. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Matthiessen, F.O. 1931. Translation: An Elizabethan Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Poltermann, Andreas. 1992. ‘Normen des literarischen Übersetzens im System der Literatur’. In Geschichte, System, Literarische Übersetzung. Histories, Systems, Literary Translations, edited by Harald Kittel, 5–31. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Prendergast, Christopher, ed. 2004. Debating World Literature. London & New York: Verso. Schiavi, Giuliana. 1996. ‘There is Always a Teller in a Tale’. Target 8, 1–22. Venuti, Lawrence. 2016. ‘Hijacking Translation: How Comp Lit Continues to Suppress Translated Texts’. Boundary 2 42, 179–204. Venuti, Lawrence. 2019. Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

PART 1

Approaches





1 TRANSLATION’S OTHER [1996]

1.1 If it is true that in the beginning was the word, then almost from the beginning there was a problem of translation. Or rather, there is, in that beginning, a problem of translation; it is still here, in this beginning, in the very word which was there when I began. I am, of course, referring to the Biblical word, the notorious crux in the opening sentence of the Gospel according to John, ‘In the beginning was the Word’ – although, in fact, the word that was there in the beginning was logos, as the text was in Greek. A facile remark, I know, but useful as a reminder. We are only too ready to overlook translation, even when it is staring us in the face. We easily forget just how much translation has gone into the making of our culture. Perhaps, though, logos was not, at first, such a problem, at least not for the early Bible translators. Saint Jerome, after all, gave us the straight verbum in the Latin version that became known as the Vulgate, and in the Latin-speaking Western church, the Vulgate remained unchallenged for a thousand years. Until Erasmus, that is. Erasmus – probably the most famous Dutchman ever, perhaps because he never wrote a word of Dutch – pulled the rug from under Jerome’s feet by arguing, at great and persuasive length, that the Latin sermo, ‘speech’ or ‘discourse’, translated the Greek logos more adequately than Jerome’s verbum. And because Erasmus’s castigatio, as he called it, faulted Jerome on a substantial number of such translation choices, his edition and profusely annotated translation of the New Testament in 1516 decisively undermined the authority of the Vulgate in the Western church. Luther, as we know, would be the first to make use of Erasmus’s New Testament for his own, German version. But there is another beginning that draws on logos and is, thereby, drawn into the problem of translation. This takes us back to Aristotle but let me make DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-3

16  Approaches

my approach with the help of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Being a hermeneuticist, Gadamer is very much alive to questions of meaning and interpretation. In an essay from 1966, ‘Man and Language’ – an essay which, appropriately, in view of its title, begins and ends with issues of translation – Gadamer takes up Aristotle’s classic definition of a human person as a being endowed with logos. Rather than the usual rendering which defines humans as ‘rational beings’, translating logos as ‘reason’ or ‘thought’, Gadamer prefers to understand – and, therefore, to translate – logos as ‘language’. A person is not only a rational being but also, perhaps even primarily, a language animal. Gadamer’s point is that humanity’s distinguishing feature consists in the capacity to communicate beyond the sphere of the immediately given, for example, by referring to general or abstract concepts or to the future. Through language, humans can make manifest that which is not immediately present to the senses. This allows complex social organisation and culture so that logos extends into notions such as ‘concept’ and ‘law’ (Gadamer 1977, 59–68). Hermeneutics and, with it, translation, are now just around the corner. To the extent that language facilitates human interaction and fixes forms of cultural expression more or less permanently, it requires interpretation, time and again. And as Gadamer reminds us in a couple of other essays from the 1960s, ‘[h]ermeneutics operates wherever what is said is not immediately intelligible’ (Gadamer 1977, 18, 98). This operation takes place in the first instance within the same tradition, when the accidents of time and change have erected obstacles to the transmission of linguistic meaning in written texts that have come to look distant, alien. Crucially, the process involves a form of translation. Hence, as Gadamer puts it, ‘[f ]rom the structure of translation was indicated the general problem of making what is alien our own’ (Gadamer 1977, 19). How this process works in practice within one and the same linguistic and cultural tradition is illustrated in the opening chapter of George Steiner’s After Babel. The chapter, which deals with the kind of deciphering required in making sense of the language of English writers from Shakespeare to Noel Coward, is suitably entitled ’Understanding as Translation’ (Steiner 1992, 1–50). When we have reached this point – the point where we understand ‘understanding’ as ‘translation’ – we can broaden our scope. In fact, we can broaden it so much that it is hard to see where the end might be. Translation, then, very nearly becomes the human condition. Every act of understanding involves an act of translation of one kind or another. It is tempting to call, here, on a philosopher such as Jacques Derrida, speaking about ‘the redoubtable, irreducible difficulty of translation’: ‘With the problem of translation we will be dealing with nothing less than the problem of the passage into philosophy’ (Derrida 1981, 72). This is not the road I want to take, if only because I am not a philosopher, nor even much of a hermeneuticist, come to that. Yet, I want to stay with Gadamer for just a bit longer. Hermeneutics may, initially, have envisaged its endeavours as taking place within one and the same cultural and linguistic tradition, but to the extent that its general thrust – its

Translation’s Other [1996]  17

‘problem of making what is alien our own’ – resembles the structure of translation, it is not confined to monolingual operations. The alien is alien because it is, for all practical purposes, part of an alien world – a foreign language. Here is Gadamer again, speaking about hermeneutics as the transmission, the translation, of lost or inaccessible meaning: As the art of conveying what is said in a foreign language to the understanding of another person, hermeneutics is not without reason named after Hermes, the interpreter of the divine message to mankind. If we recall the origin of the name hermeneutics, it becomes clear that we are dealing here with a language event, with a translation from one language to another, and therefore with the relation of two languages. (Gadamer 1977, 98–99) The model of hermeneutics is translation in its conventional sense, as translation between languages. The gods speak a language that is different from ours; therefore, Hermes has to mediate and interpret between them and us. Human communities, too, speak in mutually unintelligible tongues. In the end, it does not really matter whether we think of this unintelligibility as extending diachronically within one tradition, with language change erecting the barrier over time, or as being spread, synchronically, over a certain geographical space, with different languages being spoken side by side. Humans may be language animals, but they are never language animals in a general or abstract sense. We always inhabit a specific language. More than that, unless we find ways of overcoming the limits of our particular language, we remain imprisoned in it. The shadow that falls over a statement like this is, of course, that of Babel, of the multiplicity and confusion of tongues. And it is entirely appropriate, as indeed Derrida has exquisitely reminded us, that Babel itself, like logos, is a word that defies translation. If Babel spread linguistic confusion and, thereby, necessitated translation, it also rendered translation profoundly problematical, beginning with the word Babel itself, which is both a proper name and a common noun meaning ‘confusion’ – even though there appears to be some confusion as to whether, or to what extent, it really does mean ‘confusion’ (Derrida 1985, 166–73). And if understanding is translation, surely Babel confounds not only the translator but the hermeneuticist as well. Be that as it may, and before leaving hermeneutics to sort out its own problems with Babel, let me retrieve from the hermeneutic endeavour two aspects that are of direct relevance to translation, or at least to translation as we commonly perceive it. The first is that of cultural transmission and retrieval; the second that of interpretation as making something intelligible to others by means of verbal explanation and gloss. The first, transmission and retrieval, points to the translator as enabler, as one who provides access by removing barriers, by leading across the chasms that prevent understanding. The second, making intelligible, points to how the enabling

18 

Approaches

and the provision of access is achieved: by offering a mirror image of that which itself remains beyond reach, by presenting a reproduction, a replica, a representation. The first generates the metaphor of translation as building bridges, or as ferrying or carrying across, as translatio, as ‘metaphor’. The second appeals to translation as resemblance, as likeness, as imitation, as mimesis, not of the world of extralinguistic phenomena but of another text, another entity of a linguistic order. The two metaphors are connected because the trust that we, on this side of the language barrier, place in the translator as mediator and enabler depends on the quality, or the presumed quality, of the translation as likeness, as resemblance, as a truthful portrait. A translation, being a derived product, may be secondary and, therefore, second-best, but because we trust the mediator’s integrity and good faith, we assume that the replica is ‘as good as’ the real thing. The last thing we want to do is to bank on a forger or a counterfeiter. Yet this is exactly what we are doing. It is in the nature of translation. It is also what makes translation worth studying. The rather smooth, unruffled picture of translation that I have just painted has an ‘other’ to it – a more unsettling but also a much more interesting and intriguing side. The smooth, unruffled picture may be part of the conventional perception and self-presentation of translation, but it papers over the cracks. I want to try and poke my finger into at least some of these cracks. And the reason for doing so lies in the recognition that translation, for all its presumed secondariness, derives its force from the fact that it is still our only answer to, and our only escape from, Babel. ‘Translation’s Other’, then, comprises, among other things, the ambivalences and paradoxes, the hybridity and plurality of translation, its ‘otherness’ as ‘awkwardness’, if you like, in contrast to the perception of translation as replica or reproduction, as referring simply and unproblematically (if always from an inferior position) to an original. But it also means the significance of translation as a cultural force, which belies the common view of it as mechanical and merely derivative, secondary, second-hand, second-rate.

1.2 Let me return, for a moment, to what I called the self-presentation of translation. This is the kind of self-promotional – and widely accepted – image that resides in telling metaphors such as ‘Speaking through an interpreter, President Yeltsin declared that …’. What does it mean to say: ‘speaking through an interpreter’? Or take a variant: we all blithely claim that we have read Dostoevsky, Dante, Douwes Dekker, Kazantzakis, Kaf ka and Kundera. Hardly anyone will have read all of these in the original languages. We have read some or most of them in translation, in the standard sense of interlingual translation. To the extent that translation successfully manages to produce, or to project, a sense of equivalence, a sense of transparency and trustworthiness entitling the translation to function as a full-scale representation and, hence, as a reliable substitute for a source text,

Translation’s Other [1996]  19

statements such as ‘I have read Dostoevsky’ are a legitimate shorthand for saying ‘I have actually read a translation of Dostoevsky’, which then amounts to saying ‘and this is practically as good as reading the original’. But note, only to the extent that a ‘sense’ of equivalence, of equality in practical use value, has been produced. And we tend to believe that this ‘sense’ of equivalence results from the very transparency of the translation as resemblance. A translation, we say, is at its most successful when its being a translation goes unnoticed, when it manages not to remind us that it is a translation. A translation most coincides with its original when it is most transparent, when it approximates pure resemblance. This requires that the translator’s labour be, as it were, negated, or sublimated, that all traces of the translator’s intervention in the text be erased. The irony is that those traces, those words, are all we have; they are all we have access to on this side of the language barrier. The Russian president may well speak right through his interpreter, but all we have to make sense of are the interpreter’s words. Nevertheless, we say that Yeltsin stated so-and-so and that we have read Dostoevsky. Even though, in the translation, this presumed authoritative originary voice is absent, we casually state it is the only one that presents itself to us. We feel entitled to be casual about this because we construe translation as a form of delegated speech, a kind of speaking by proxy. This implies not only a consonance of voices but also a hierarchical relationship between them, as well as a clear moral – often even legal – imperative, that of the translator’s noninterference. The imperative has been formulated as the ‘honest spokesperson’ or the ‘true interpreter’ norm, which calls on the translator simply and accurately to restate the original, the whole original and nothing but the original (Harris 1990). In this view, the model of translation is direct quotation – nothing omitted, nothing added, nothing changed, except, of course, the language, which is to say, every word. The moment we stop to think about this, we realise we are entertaining an illusion. Even without invoking the problematics of a separation of signifier and signified or of a metaphysics of presence, we can appreciate that a translation will never coincide with its source. Languages and cultures are not symmetrical or isomorphic systems. For every instance of consonance, however measured, there is also dissonance. Not only the language changes with translation; so does the context, the intent, the function, the entire communicative situation. Because the translator’s intervention in this process cannot simply be neutralised or erased without trace, a more appropriate model of translated discourse might be indirect speech rather than direct quotation, if only because indirect speech increases distance and difference, acknowledges the likelihood of manipulation and misuse and is generally messier in the way it superimposes and intermingles the various voices that make up its re-enunciation (Folkart 1991). It is difference and, therefore, opaqueness and untidiness that are inscribed in the operations of translation, not coincidence or transparency or equivalence in any formal sense. Speaking of translation in terms of equivalence means engaging in an elaborate – if socially necessary – act of make-believe.

20  Approaches

1.3 Various more or less philosophical and poststructuralist avenues open up here, but let me focus on a more immediately obvious aspect: the question of the translator’s supposed non-interference, which translates as the translator’s invisibility in the translated text. My point is that translated texts – like other texts, only more so – are always, inherently, plural, unstable, decentred, hybrid. The ‘other’ voice, the translator’s voice, is always there. But because of the way we have conventionally construed translation, we prefer – we even require – this voice to remain discreet. In practice, many translations try hard to comply with this requirement. Sometimes, however, translations run into what we might call ‘performative self-contradiction’. The resulting incongruities in the text remind us that, while we generally accept that translated texts are reoriented toward a different type of reader in a different linguistic and cultural environment, we expect the agent, and, hence, the voice, that effected this reorientation to remain so discreet as to vanish altogether. That is not always possible, and then the translation may be caught blatantly contradicting its own performance. And if we can demonstrate the translator’s discursive presence in those cases, we can postulate a translator’s voice, however indistinct, in all translations. Let me illustrate the point with a couple of instances in which we can clearly discern other voices intruding into a discourse in which they were not meant to be heard. The first and pretty obvious example bears on what Roman Jakobson calls the metalinguistic function of language; Derrida speaks of language ‘remarking’ itself in a text which declares that it is in a certain language. In translation, this causes problems, as, indeed, Derrida has shown with reference to the final chapter of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode of 1637. There, Descartes confirms, in French, that he has written his book not in Latin but in French. The Latin translation of the Discours omits this embarrassing sentence to avoid the self-contradiction of a statement declaring in Latin that it is not in Latin but in French. Derrida regards this as an instance of institutional untranslatability, which is a perfectly valid observation, as, indeed, in the Latin version, the sentence was omitted (1992, 257). For the reader of the Latin Dissertatio de methodo (Descartes 1644), however, the omission is not readily detectable because the statement is simply not there. In translations into languages other than Latin, where the sentence is translated, the self-contradiction may be less glaring but it is still obvious enough. The Penguin version, for example, has: ‘And if I write in French [...] rather than in Latin [...] it is because [...]’ (Descartes 1968, 91). The anomaly of reading an English sentence which declares in English that it is actually in French creates a credibility gap which readers can overcome only be reminding themselves that this is, of course, a translation. But in so doing, the reader also realises that the voice producing the statement cannot possibly belong to Descartes or to Descartes only. There is, clearly, another voice at work, a voice we are not meant to hear, which echoes and mimes the first voice

Translation’s Other [1996]  21

but never fully coincides with it. And that other voice is there in the text itself, in every word of it. Derrida himself has exploited this paradox of translation more than once in his own writings, sometimes openly challenging his translators to find solutions to his insistent wordplay. When solutions are found, they are so charged with irony that they cannot be read without the awareness that the text contains another, intermittently audible voice that cannot be reduced to Derrida’s. And when no solution is found, the translated text’s manifest helplessness is no less revealing. In all these cases, we can ask: whose words are we, in fact, reading? Exactly who is speaking? And if we are dealing with more voices than one, where do we locate them? My other example concerns an instance of structural overdetermination in literary fiction. It comes from the Dutch novel Max Havelaar (1860) by Multatuli, an extraordinary novel in several respects. I want to pick out just a single short sentence from it, but one that involves the book’s entire structure. In its barest narrative essence, Max Havelaar tells the story of a character called Max Havelaar and his wife, Tine. Havelaar is a Dutch civil servant in the colonial administration of the Dutch East Indies in the 1850s. Witnessing the exploitation of the local population by the native élite, he protests in vain to his immediate superior. When he ignores the administrative hierarchy and brings a charge against the corrupt local ruler, he is relieved of his post and resigns in disgust. This story is told as a novel within a novel. The Havelaar story is embedded in a framing story, which is set in Amsterdam and concerns a penny-pinching, narrow-minded, self-righteous Dutch coffee broker. He has in his firm a young German trainee, who eventually becomes the main narrator of the Havelaar story. In the book’s final pages, both the Havelaar story and its frame are swept aside when a third narrator, Multatuli himself, intervenes with an openly political message in the form of an appeal to the Dutch king to stop the exploitation of the natives in the Dutch East Indies. With this appeal, Multatuli effectively transforms what had, up to this point, presented itself to us as a novel into a pamphlet. When he first introduces himself to the reader, Multatuli also translates his own name, multa tuli, ‘I have borne (or suffered) much’, which suggests that the name on the title page is a pseudonym. To complicate matters further, the book’s dedication (in the manuscript and the first three editions) is to ‘E.H.v.W.’, which is later (in the fourth edition) expanded to ‘Everdine Huberte Baronness van Wynbergen, loyal wife etc.’ (Multatuli 1992). Taking into account nineteenthcentury literary conventions, this leaves little doubt that the dedicatee is the wife of – well, not of a pseudonym, but presumably of the real-life author behind the pseudonym. This is, indeed, the case. The real-life writer of Max Havelaar is Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820–87), who went through an experience in the Dutch East Indies not unlike that of the fictional character Max Havelaar. Now, in the Havelaar story there is, at one point, a conversation between Havelaar and his wife, Tine. During this conversation, Tine asks her husband if he remembers how he once translated her initials. In the English version, in

22 

Approaches

which everything obviously happens in English, Havelaar replies: ‘E.H.V.W.: eigen haard veel waard’. To the English reader, these last four words make no sense. More importantly, the incongruity of suddenly reverting to Dutch in the middle of a book that is meant to be in English, jolts us out of any willing suspension of disbelief, reminding us not only that we are reading a translation but also that there is another voice speaking here, a voice that cannot possibly be identical to any one of the various narrators deployed in the book. The reason for the lapse into Dutch in the English translation is a matter of overdetermination. The initials of Havelaar’s wife, E.H.V.W., are identical to those of the book’s dedicatee, who, beyond the pseudonym, is the real author’s real wife. Just as, in transforming itself from novel into pamphlet, the book, as a whole, ‘leaps out of literature into the real world’ (Oversteegen 1983, 103), so the initials of a fictional character in the novel are tied to those of a real-life person. That is why they cannot be changed. And because, in translating those initials, Havelaar makes them into a preformed, fixed phrase – a common proverb – in which the first letters of each word repeat the initials (E.H.V.W.: ‘eigen haard veel waard’, meaning something like ‘there’s no place like home’), the translation short-circuits and reverts back to Dutch. In so doing, it explodes its own makebelieve and exposes this ‘other’ voice that has been superimposed on the voices of the various fictional narrators – and that we, as readers, were supposed to ignore.

1.4 What is at stake in texts like these is more than a matter of plural, unstable and decentred narrative voices. The question of voice points to a much broader issue, that of translation as a cultural and ideological construct. We see this construct reflected in the standard perception of translation as transparency and duplication, as not only consonant but as coinciding with its original, requiring that translators, too, become transparent – that they spirit themselves away in the interests of the original’s integrity and status. Only the translator who operates with self-effacing discretion and deference can be trusted not to violate the original. The loyal self-abnegation of the one guarantees the primacy of the other. Historically, the hierarchical positioning of originals versus translations has been expressed in terms of stereotyped oppositions such as those between creative versus derivative work, primary versus secondary, art versus craft, authority versus obedience, freedom versus constraint and speaking in one’s own name versus speaking for someone else. In each instance, it is translation which is circumscribed, subordinated, contained and controlled. And in case we should imagine that these are natural and necessary hierarchies, it will be useful to remember that our culture has often construed gender distinctions in terms of strikingly similar oppositions of creative versus reproductive, original versus derivative, active versus passive and dominant versus subservient. The point here is not just that the historical discourse about translation is sexist in casting translation in the role of maidservant or faithful and obedient wife but also that

Translation’s Other [1996]  23

translation has been hedged in by means of ideological hierarchies reminiscent of those employed to maintain sexual power relations. There’s more. Ever since literary theory began to emphasise the role of the reader in investing texts with meaning, and the role of convention and the play of intertextuality in the production of texts that are but variations on existing patterns and texts, we have come to appreciate, on the one hand, the inexhaustibility and irrepressibility of meaning-making and, on the other, the various mechanisms by which our culture, nevertheless, attempts to control meaning. In Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘author function’, as he explains it in the essay ‘What is an Author?’, these two come together: the ‘author function’ is the ideological figure that we devise to keep the free circulation of meaning within bounds (Foucault 1980). We do this primarily by positing a single unifying subject, with a single voice, behind the text. We, thus, suppress the more uncontrollable aspects of texts, their loose ends, their gaps, their unintended or unattributable features, their plurality and heterogeneity. Translation further compounds and intensifies this refractory growth (Littau 1993, forthcoming). Translations temporarily fix interpretations which, as verbal constructs, are themselves open to interpretation. They transform ‘originals’ which are themselves transformations of texts which are themselves transformations, etcetera. They increase the plurivocality of already plural texts. If, therefore, our culture needs an ‘author function’ to circumscribe the semantic potential and plurality of texts, it is not hard to see why it has also, emphatically, created a ‘translator function’ to contain the exponential increase in signification and plurivocality which translation brings about. As an ideological and historical construct, the ‘translator function’ serves to keep translation in a safe place – in a hierarchical order. The metaphors and oppositions that put translation in its place, the expectations and attitudes we bring to translated texts and the legal constraints under which translation operates all accord with this function. It enables the shorthand of my stating that I have read Dostoevsky when I have read a translation of Dostoevsky. By the same token, we accept that the safest translation is an ‘authorised’ translation as one formally and legally approved by the author. The term itself confirms the singularity of intent, the coincidence of voice, the illusion of equivalence and, of course, the unmistakable relation of power and authority. This line of thought has far-reaching consequences, which current approaches to translation are only beginning to explore. Let me, therefore, take a step back and return to the notion of translation as transmission and mediation. Here, too, it is a matter of discerning other aspects of translation than those displayed in translation’s traditional self-image. What I want to focus on is the element of disjunction and difference, not just in actual translations but also in ideas about translation and the use made of translation in a social and historical context. All texts require some frame of reference shared between source and receiver to be able to function as vehicles for communication. The various forms of linguistic, temporal and geographical displacement that translation brings about also dislocate this shared environment. We all recognise that in translating, in

24 

Approaches

recasting and repackaging a source text for a new recipient in a different cultural circuit, a degree of alteration, adjustment and manipulation must take place. It is not only the fact itself of this dislocation that is of interest. At least as interesting is its social and historical conditioning – the ways in which translation, as different communities have construed it at different times, transforms its primary material. In the study of translation, the interesting question is not whether a text has been transmitted more or less intact. What is of interest is the nature of the changes that have been wrought and why certain changes were wrought and not others. What I mean is this: in translating, rewriting, transforming, appropriating and relocating a given source text, the translator attunes the emergent entity to a new communicative situation. Just how much and what kind of attuning and adaptation is permitted or acceptable will depend on prevailing concepts of translation in the host culture and on who has the power to impose them. To the extent that translation, or the ‘translator function’, is construed as a reenunciation of an existing text, the practice of translation inevitably results in all manner of tensions within the translated text quite apart from the fact that it makes translations into hybrid things which ‘signify’ much in the way other texts signify but, in addition, entertain an emphatic relation to another text in another language. At the same time, translations cannot help being enmeshed in the discursive forms of the recipient culture, including the whole array of modes which a culture may have developed to represent anterior and differently coded discourses. Translation – like adaptation, pastiche, commentary, remake, parody or plagiarism – is one mode of textual recycling among others. The specific and always historically determinate way in which a cultural community construes translation, therefore, also determines the way in which translation, as a cultural product, refers to its donor text – the kind of image of the original which the translation projects or holds up. In other words, the ‘other’ to which a translated text refers is never simply the source text, even though that is the claim which translations commonly make. It is, at best, an image of it – a mirror image, perhaps, provided we think of it as an image reflected in a kaleidoscopic, distorting mirror. Because the image is always distorted, never innocent, we can say that translation constructs or produces or – one step further – ‘invents’ its original (Niranjana 1992, 81). It is reasonable to assume, moreover, that translations are made in response to or in anticipation of demands and needs of the recipient culture. If this is the case, then the selection of texts to be translated, the mode that is chosen to (re)present or project or invent the source text, the manner in which translation generally is circumscribed and regulated at a particular historical moment and the way in which individual translations are received tells us a great deal about that cultural community. What exactly does it tell us? To my mind, translation provides a privileged index of cultural self-reference or, if you prefer, self-definition. In reflecting about itself, a culture, or a section of it, tends to define its own identity

Translation’s Other [1996]  25

in terms of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ – that is, in relation to that which it perceives as different from itself, that which lies outside the boundary of its own sphere of operations or is outside its own ‘system’. Translation offers a window on cultural self-definition because it involves not only the selection and importation of cultural goods from the outside world but at the same time – in the same breath, as it were – their transformation into terms which the recipient culture recognises, to some extent at least, as its own. And because the history of translation leaves in its wake a large number of dual texts as well as countless retranslations and reworkings of existing translations, it provides us with a uniquely accessible series of cultural constructions of the ‘other’ and, therefore, with first-hand evidence of the workings of cultural self-definition. In this perspective, resistance or indifference to translation, even the absence of translation, can be as informative as the pursuit of this or that type of translation; and it is important to remember that when translation occurs, it is always a particular type of translation. Translators never ‘just translate’. They translate in the context of certain conceptions of and expectations about translation. Within this context, they make choices and take up positions because they have goals to reach, interests to pursue, material and symbolic stakes to defend. Both the context and the actions of individuals and groups are socially determined. Translators, too, are social agents.

1.5 In short, where a culture feels the need or sees an opportunity to import texts from beyond a language barrier, and to do so by means of translation, we can learn a great deal from looking closely at such things as what is selected for translation from the range of potentially available texts, and who makes the relevant decisions; who produces the translations, under what conditions, for whom and with what effect or impact; what form do the translations take, i.e., what choices have been made in relation to existing expectations and practices in the same discursive field and in comparable fields; and who speaks about translation, in what terms and with what authority. This obviously involves much more than can be illustrated here. Let me pick up just a couple of points bearing on translation in a particular historical configuration: the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the period which sees not only the breakthrough of the Reformation and Renaissance but also, in the seventeenth century, the rise, greatness and impending fall of the Dutch Republic. The manner in which translation is viewed, the character of the translations themselves and the uses made of them, take us right into the cultural self-perception of the period. A few historical moments will have to suffice (in what follows I draw on the material in Hermans 1996). We may begin in Antwerp, the economic and cultural heart of the Low Countries around the mid-sixteenth century. Here the rhetorician Cornelis van Ghistele, who gave Dutch Renaissance writing its first substantial boost with a series of renderings from the Classics, translated for

26  Approaches

a specific audience, with a specific aim and, therefore, in a specific mode. His readership consisted of those merchants and patricians who had, perhaps, only limited school Latin but an active interest in the new prestige culture and the money to buy expensive books. For them, Van Ghistele translated the canonical names known from the Latin schools: Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Terence. In his prefaces and in his practice as a translator, he did everything he could to bring the foreign authors to his audience, employing a common verse form, using the prestige of the Ancients to enhance the status of modern dramatic forms and writing his own sequels to demonstrate the potential of the classical genres. The one translation in which he did not steer this course proved to be a commercial failure. Van Ghistele appealed to his readers’ self-esteem by writing disdainfully about popular chapbooks that contained mere entertainment, trivialised Ovid as no more than a teller of fantastic tales or still presented Virgil in the medieval manner as a sorcerer, while also, at the other end of the cultural spectrum, voicing disapproval of the elitism of those intellectually highbrow Humanist circles who wrote exclusively in Latin. Van Ghistele’s vernacular translations consistently carried cross-references to the Latin texts, and he produced literary work in both Dutch and Latin himself. Whereas Van Ghistele provided his readers with the means to increase what Pierre Bourdieu would call their cultural capital by supplying them with fashionable prestige goods, the other major translator of the period, Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, who lived mostly in Holland, took up writers like Boethius, Cicero and Seneca in the context of a conception of poetry as moral instruction, with the help of classical rhetoric and a keen regard for the quality of the vernacular. When he was in his thirties and before he knew any Latin, Coornhert rewrote an existing Flemish version of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, adapting it to Northern Dutch usage. In this exercise, the accuracy of the translation as translation was not his main concern, although he was to translate Boethius ‘properly’ 30 years later. When Coornhert picked up Seneca, he characteristically chose De beneficiis for translation; from Cicero’s works, he selected De officiis. Coornhert, an intellectual streetfighter to whom Calvin once referred as a ‘raving dog’ because of his relentless advocacy of religious tolerance at a time when this was not a universally popular line to take, also emerged in the 1580s as the author of the first book on ethics written in Dutch, and he was closely associated with the first Dutch handbooks on the trivium (grammar, dialectic and rhetoric). Because these subjects, and, for that matter, subjects such as mathematics, law and medicine, had traditionally been dealt with in Latin, vernacular writing covering these domains employed a systematic policy of translating technical terms from the Latin. Coornhert’s translations play a formative part in this wide-ranging and self-conscious project of cultural politics. Just how central a part was assigned to translation in the formation of a Dutch national culture around the turn of the seventeenth century may be gleaned from some poems by the well-known painter, poet and art historian Karel van Mander. Among other things, Van Mander translated Virgil’s Bucolics and

Translation’s Other [1996]  27

Georgics ‘in the French manner’ – that is, in metrical verse. The book appeared in Haarlem in 1597. There is a unique copy of this edition (now in the University Library in Ghent) which has an extra quire at the back, containing nine poems by Van Mander in which he calls on prominent literary and public figures to follow his example and translate the Classics as a service to the nation and as proof of cultural proficiency, in the firm belief that painters, as well as poets, need to be familiar with the Ancients (he went on to write an extensive interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with the relevant iconography attached, and to translate the Iliad into alexandrines, via a French version) and in a language, incidentally, which Van Mander, being a Flemish refugee, wanted to be known as ‘Flemish’; but that, as we know, was a lost cause. Van Mander’s programme would actually be carried out in the following decades, most notably by Joost van den Vondel, the ‘prince of poets’ and the major tragic playwright of the Dutch seventeenth century. Vondel translated prodigiously from a range of languages in a lifelong search for literary examples and models. For him, translatio began as personal exercitatio, matured into imitatio and aemulatio and, at every stage, informed a type of inventio that sought to extend and enrich both a national and a supranational tradition in the vernacular. That this is true not just of Vondel’s own production but also of the increasingly self-confident literary culture of the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch Republic generally, may be illustrated ex negativo with reference to the West Flemish Catholic priest Adrianus de Buck, a now forgotten figure whose translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy appeared in Bruges, i.e., in the Southern Netherlands then still under Spanish rule, in 1653. The book has come down to us in a mere two copies. De Buck’s preface leaves the reader in no doubt that he is green with envy at the miracle of Dutch culture in the Northern Netherlands, not least because, he observes, they have appropriated the learning of every language in the world, including Hebrew, Turkish and Arabic. De Buck is acutely aware of living in what, by comparison to the Republic in the north, is rapidly becoming a cultural backwater and one which has already felt the effects of France’s expansionism (the town of Veurne, where De Buck was living, had been overrun by French troops a few years earlier). So, he translates Boethius, partly to offer consolation to his compatriots who have suffered at the hands of the French, partly because he thinks (mistakenly, as it happens) that the Protestant heretics in the North had left Boethius untranslated on account of the references to free will and purgatory in the Consolation and partly because he wants to prove that, as he puts it, ‘the sun also shines on our West Flemish land and that there is fire in our souls too’. This is presumably the reason why, in his translation, he renders every one of the poems in Boethius twice, in two different metres. Through his decision to translate, through his selection of a particular text to translate and through opting for a particular mode of translating, De Buck offers us a cultural self-definition, a positioning which is religious and political as well as cultural and, more narrowly, literary.

28  Approaches

By the mid-century, the cultural self-confidence of the Dutch Republic had reached a point where the beneficial role of translation was no longer taken for granted. In the 1650s and 1660s, dissonant views regarding the need for and the value of translation began to be voiced. But the denigration of translation typically came from individuals or circles not directly associated with the more canonical, classicising genres. They asserted the primacy of inventio over imitatio, but they could not capture the centre ground of cultural politics. It may even be symptomatic that, for all its apparent self-confidence, the Republic did not simultaneously develop an equivalent to the so-called belles infidèles translations which were appearing in France from the 1630s onward and which were marked by the kind of sovereign appropriation of the ‘other’ which invites comparison with the expansionist policies France would adopt in other domains in the age of Louis XIV. Some Dutch writers were perfectly aware of how high-prestige cultural translation was developing in France. The very first occurrence of the term belles infidèles in writing, anywhere, is in a letter of 12 March 1666 by Constantijn Huygens – a Latin letter, so the term is, appropriately, first attested in translation (pulcherrima nimirum, sed infida) (Worp 1917, 183). Yet for all his polyglot virtuosity, Huygens himself subscribed to a much stricter view of translation, as did Vondel. The views and example of these two prominent men of letters served as a point of reference for most other translators, as, by now, a local translation tradition had established itself. As French cultural hegemony began to assert itself all over Europe, the Republic’s international power and prestige also began to wane and the calls for originality in Dutch letters were drowned. At the end of the 1660s, we encounter sharply opposing views on translation. On one side were playwrights such as Jan Vos, Joan Blasius and Thomas Asselijn, who wrote non-Classicising, action-filled, often politically motivated cloak-and-dagger plays, and who loudly declared that no amount of translating or imitating can bestow lasting fame. They were opposed by the newly formed French-Classicist society Nil Volentibus Arduum, whose members imported French models and, fine-tuning these, whenever necessary, to the immutable rules of reason and art, subjected existing translations to ruthless criticism and revision and even deliberately produced rival translations to challenge other people’s versions. One of the leading lights of this society, Andries Pels, criticised Rembrandt for following nature and his own inclination rather than the rules of art and reason. In their translations, too, the Nil members put into practice their idea that ‘there is greater achievement in improving a poorly written play while translating it than in writing a completely new one’ (Meijer Drees 1989, 129). There was, in other words, a fierce struggle for cultural power and legitimacy going on, and translation – a certain kind of translation of certain kinds of source texts – was one of the main stakes as well as the principal weapon. The French-Classicists won the day and went on to control the Amsterdam theatre for decades to come. Of the ten new plays staged in Amsterdam during the 1678 season, six issued from the Nil circle; four of these were translations

Translation’s Other [1996]  29

produced by Nil with the express aim of combating other versions. Translated plays continued to outnumber original Dutch works in the Amsterdam theatre until the 1770s. In the eighteenth century, a similar situation prevailed with respect to prose fiction and especially popular prose. This helps us to understand how it came about that when, in 1782, there appeared the epistolary novel Sara Burgerhart by Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken, now generally regarded as the first modern novel in Dutch, its title page bore the proud inscription ‘Not Translated’ – an extraordinary statement, the significance of which has hardly been appreciated in Dutch literary historiography (Buijnsters 1984 being the exception).

1.6 Different but not fundamentally dissimilar pictures could be painted for other periods and for cultures other than Dutch – in fact, for all periods and all cultures. Even when contemporary Anglo-American culture translates notoriously little from foreign languages, historically it owes as much to translation as any other. Moreover, as I indicated earlier, resistance or hostility or indifference to translation in certain periods has its own significance for cultural self-definition. If we reckon, then, that translation, together with the various practices lying in its immediate vicinity, is worth serious and sustained attention, both on account of the complexity of the phenomenon itself and in view of its cultural interest, it is also worth assessing the weight and import of the concepts that govern this practice and exploring its modalities and parameters. This involves delving into the question of what exactly, in different periods and contexts, is covered by the terms and concepts, the images and metaphors used to conceptualise and locate translation. It means, more broadly, investigating not only the practice of translation and the various factors that govern it but also the discourse about translation, its historical and historically unstable self-description. A single, brief illustration will have to do here. The characterisation of translation in pictorial terms is one instance which involves reading the historical metaphors. Comparing translation to the activity of apprentice painters copying the works of the masters, for example, has been a means of highlighting various aspects of translation, including its role as an exercise for the aspiring poet; its social usefulness as the provision of a readily accessible, if imperfect, copy of an inaccessible original (and a poor copy is better than none); its qualitative inferiority vis-à-vis the model because, as Quintilian says, the copy is necessarily inferior to that which it copies; its affinity with imitation, both being forms of homage to an acknowledged master; its nature as a form of secondary mimesis, an imitation of a work which is, itself, thought of as an imitation of nature; its difficulty, as the translator’s palette of words is necessarily different from that of his or her model; and its double referentiality, as a statement in its own right and as a restatement of an existing utterance (Korpel 1995). Which of these senses is activated or exploited, when, by whom, in preference to which other available metaphors and for what purpose?

30 

Approaches

The patient tracing and detailing of these self-descriptions is often our only way of assessing how translation was conceptualised in the past. It also provides an insight into our current discourse about translation, which, after all, translates ‘translation’ by means of comparable concepts and metaphors. Are not all our theories of an essentially metaphorical nature? There is much to be unearthed, pieced together and interpreted here, partly, at least, because, traditionally, the material – actual translations as well as the poetics of translation – has received scant attention in literary and cultural histories written mostly along monolingual lines, inspired by a post-Romantic concept of originality and centred on canonical works and authors. But the climate is changing. The renewed emphasis in literary historiography on the social context and the institutional structures in which literature operates has created room for the study of hitherto marginalised but socially as well as intellectually relevant phenomena such as translation. At least as important has been the ceaseless questioning of just about all the traditional key concepts of literary study by one branch or another of recent literary theory. As such, seemingly homogenous notions like the ‘author’ or the ‘original’ were dismantled, and the interest in hybrid, self-referential, ironic and intertextual forms grew. And finally, there is the fact that, in recent decades, the study of translation itself has significantly broadened its scope by breaking out of its applied, prescriptive, ancillary mould to engage in various kinds of theoretical, empirical and historical research. Instead of contributing to the containment of translation in the straitjacket of identity and reproduction, these bolder experiments have brought to the fore the plurality of translation in all its weird and wonderful manifestations. For my own approach over the years, both the theoretical speculation and the descriptive and historicising work of researchers such as Gideon Toury, José Lambert and André Lefevere, to name only these, proved particularly inspiring. The kind of work I do, then, is intended to contribute to a renewed understanding of translation, both as a historical phenomenon and a cultural construct. That, even on those occasions when the focus is on Dutch-language texts, this is done from an essentially comparative perspective seems not only inevitable, given the nature of the material, but also appropriate in view of what George Steiner, speaking in Oxford just 18 months or so ago, called the ‘primacy of the matter of translation’ in comparative literary studies (Steiner 1995, 11). Recognising the primacy of the matter of translation is one thing, the methodology of studying translation is something else. Considering the complexity and the hybrid, plural, untidy nature of translation, it is not surprising that, currently, a wide range of methodologies is being applied. My own attempts to understand translation as a communicative act and, hence, as a form of social behaviour, as a historical and culture-specific construct and as a cross-border activity involving different communities, have prompted personally rewarding forays into sociology and cultural anthropology as well as literary theory and modern systems theory – the distinctions between these various disciplines are often, mercifully, blurred. Translation, as an intellectual category and a socially

Translation’s Other [1996]  31

active force, is not the kind of subject that can be reduced to or captured by a single disciplinary approach. But I should not end this lecture with a methodological disquisition that can be of interest to devotees only. Something more paradoxical, another untidy ‘other’, this time at the metalevel of translation, will be more appropriate by way of conclusion. To appreciate it, we need to go back for a moment to Roman Jakobson’s short but influential essay ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’ of 1959. Here, Jakobson, having explained that grasping the meaning of a word involves being able to translate it, famously distinguished between three kinds of translation. They were, first, ‘intralingual translation, or rewording’, defined as the interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language; second, ‘interlingual translation, or translation proper’ – the interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language; and third, ‘intersemiotic translation, or transmutation’ – the interpretation of verbal signs by means of nonverbal sign systems ( Jakobson 1959, 233). Derrida has astutely commented on this tripartite division, pointing out that, if, for Jakobson, intralingual translation is a form of translation, then, in the essay itself, the term ‘rewording’ is a translation of the term ‘intralingual translation’. In this way, the first and the third term in the list are both translated intralingually; ‘intralingual translation’ is rendered as ‘rewording’ and ‘intersemiotic translation’ is reworded as ‘transmutation’. But in the middle term, ‘interlingual translation, or translation proper’, the word ‘translation’ is not reworded or intralingually translated. It is merely repeated, tautologically restated. This form of translation is translation; ‘interlingual translation’ is ‘translation proper’. The addition of the qualifier ‘proper’ suggests, moreover, that the other two are somehow not ‘properly’ translation. This undermines the whole exercise of ranging them all three together as kinds of translation (Derrida 1985, 173–4). Derrida went on to question the apparent transparency and homogeneity of notions such as translation and language. For my part, I am interested in the more pedestrian question of why the paradox is there in the first place. The answer, it seems to me, lies in the recognition that Jakobson’s essay is anchored in at least two different fields. As a linguistic or, more properly, a semiotic statement, the claim that ‘rewording’ and ‘transmutation’ constitute forms of translation is perfectly acceptable. From the point of view of someone professionally engaged in the study of sign systems, there is no good reason to restrict the study of translational phenomena to interlingual translation, to the exclusion of intralingual, intersemiotic or, for that matter, intrasemiotic forms. But seen from the vantage point of translation as it is commonly understood, or better, as it is socially construed, legitimated and institutionalised, the move is not permissible because there translation is translation proper and only that. The unease in Jakobson’s formulation stems from ambivalence and transgression in declaring both that translation properly understood means interlingual translation only and that translation encompasses other, comparable operations not conventionally, or

32 

Approaches

normally, covered by the term ‘translation’. Looking at the essay from today’s vantage point, we can also appreciate it both as being part of the self-description and self-reflexiveness of translation in questioning the boundaries of the field and, thus, engaging in the discussion about what is and what is not translation – what falls inside or outside – and as being part of an emerging academic discipline of translation studies. What the example shows, above all, is that, like other branches of the human sciences which cannot escape entanglement in the object they describe, the discourse about translation – including the academic discourse and the present discourse – also translates concepts and practices of ‘translation’ into its own terms. And it necessarily does so on the basis of a certain concept of translation (Bakker 1995; Lotman 1990, 269–71). In thus performing the very operations it attempts to describe, it is implicated in the self-description of translation as a cultural construct, a social institution. In that sense, the historical reflection on translation by practitioners and critics in the field, from Jerome to the present, cannot be separated from the modern metalanguage employed in research on translation. Even though some translation scholars today may want to mark the distance between object-level and metalevel, the complicity is always there, and it contributes, in its turn, to the social and cultural construction of translation as well as to the elaboration of an academic discipline. In a way, this is merely to confirm that our knowledge about translation is itself culture-bound. This, of course, we knew all along. The issue becomes acute as soon as we move beyond our immediate horizon – a move hard to avoid when dealing with translation. The problem surfaces whenever we wish to speak about ‘translation’ generally, as a transcultural, immanent or universal given or when we attempt to grasp what another culture, distant from us in time or place, means by whatever terms they use to denote an activity or a product that appears to translate as our ‘translation’, which implies that we translate according to our concept of translation and into our concept of translation. If this is the case, then the ‘other’ which our terms, as translations of the ‘other’, hold up to our view will definitely not constitute a transparent image or a faithful representation. As we saw, translation is never diaphanous, innocent or pure, never without its own distinct or indistinct voices and discursive resonances. To the extent that our understanding of another culture’s concept of translation amounts to a translation of that concept, it is subject to all the dislocations and the untidy pluralisation that come with translation. And as we also saw, the dislocations themselves are socially conditioned and, hence, significant for what they tell us about the individuals and the communities engaging in translation and, therefore, also about ourselves as students of translation. The study of translation rebounds on our own categories and assumptions, our own modes of translating translation. For those of us who want to take the study of translation seriously, there is no easy way out of these predicaments. But we can learn from them. The awareness of the pitfalls and the self-reflexiveness of ‘cultural translation’, as some ­ethnographers and cultural anthropologists call it (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus

Translation’s Other [1996]  33

and Fischer 1986; Tambiah 1990), will not make the problems go away, but it can guard against a form of rashness that ignores its own ethnocentricity and simply, reductively, translates all translation into ‘our’ translation instead of patiently, deliberately, laboriously negotiating the other’s terrain while simultaneously trying to reconceptualise our own modes of representation through translation. Translation’s other, then, is not only the hybridity and awkwardness of translation as a discursive and representational form. It is not only the significance of translation as a force in cultural history and as an index of cultural self-definition. It is also the untidiness of our disciplinary translation of translation. But, provided we approach these various transgressions cautiously, critically and self-critically, we may still, with luck, gain some insight into the perplexing otherness of translation itself as well as of the attempts, historical and contemporary, to account for it.

Bibliography Bakker, Matthijs. 1995. ‘Metaprong en wetenschap: Een kwestie van discipline’. In Vertalen historisch bezien. Tekst, metatekst, theorie, edited by Dirk Delabastita and Theo Hermans, 141–62. ‘s-Gravenhage: Stichting Bibliographia Neerlandica. Buijnsters, P.J. 1984. Nederlandse literatuur van de achttiende eeuw. Veertien verkenningen. Utrecht: HES. Clifford, James and George Marcus, ed. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1985. ‘Des tours de Babel’. Translated by Joseph Graham. In Difference in Translation, edited by Joseph Graham, 165–248. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. ‘Ulysse Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’. Translated by Tina Kendall and Shari Benstock. In Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge, 253–309. New York & London: Routledge. Descartes, René. 1644. Specimina philosophiae: seu dissertatio de methodo … Ex Gallico translata, & ab auctore perlecta. Translated by Etienne de Courcelles. Amsterdam: Lodewijk Elzevier. Descartes, René. 1968. Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Translated by F.E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Folkart, Barbara. 1991. Le conflit des énonciations. Traduction et discours rapporté. Candiac: Editions Balzac. Foucault, Michel. 1980. ‘What Is an Author?’ Translated by Josué Harari. In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, edited by Josué Harari, 141–60. London: Methuen. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1977. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by David Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harris, Brian. 1990. ‘Norms in Interpretation’. Target 2, 115–19. Hermans, Theo. 1996. Door eenen engen hals. Nederlandse beschouwingen over vertalen 1550– 1670. ‘s-Gravenhage: Stichting Bibiliographia Neerlandica. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’. In On Translation, edited by Reuben Brower, 232–9. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

34  Approaches

Korpel,Luc. 1995. ‘De schilders-metafoor in de vertaalreflectie en de veranderingen in het denken over de relatie tussen dichten, schilderen en vertalen in Nederland (1770– 1820)’. In Dans der muzen. De relatie tussen de kunsten gethematiseerd, edited by A.C.G. Fleurkens, L. Korpel, and K. Meerhoff, 141–56. Hilversum: Verloren. Littau, Karin. 1993. ‘Intertextuality and Translation: The Waste Land in French and German’. In Translation: The Vital Link, edited by Catriona Picken, 63–69. London: Chameleon Press. Littau, Karin. Forthcoming. ‘Translation in the Age of Postmodern Production. From Text to Intertext to Hypertext’. Forum for Modern Language Studies. Lotman, Yury. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Translated by Ann Shukman. London: I.B. Tauris. Marcus, George and Michael Fischer. 1986. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: The Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Meijer Drees, Marijke. 1989. De treurspelen van Thomas Asselijn (ca.1620–1701). Thesis, University of Utrecht. Multatuli. 1992. Max Havelaar of de koffiveilingen der Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappy [1860]. Edited by A. Kets-Vree. 2 vols. Assen & Maastricht: Van Gorcum. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Oversteegen, J.J. 1983. ‘De organisatie van Max Havelaar’. In De Novembristen van Merlyn. Een literatuuropvatting in theorie en praktijk, edited by J.J. Oversteegen, 77–103. Utrecht: HES. Sötemann, A.S. 1973. De structuur van de ‘Max Havelaar’. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff. Steiner, George. 1992. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. 2nd ed. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Steiner, George. 1995. What Is Comparative Literature? Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tambiah, S.J. 1990. Magic, Science, Religion and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worp, J.A., ed. 1917. De briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens. Vol. 6. ‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff.

2 PARADOXES AND APORIAS IN TRANSLATION AND TRANSLATION STUDIES [2002]

Many of us make use of translation, in one form or another, on a daily basis. We also talk about it, informally, perhaps not quite every day, but regularly. The terms in which we speak about translation are familiar to all concerned. We find ourselves perfectly at home in the standard images and metaphors we employ to characterise translation. Consciously or subconsciously, we are all profoundly influenced by the way in which our culture denotes, delineates and, ultimately, constructs translation through various kinds of figurative usage. We take those ways of speaking for granted. We recognise what is happening, for instance, when translation is described by means of such metaphors as building bridges, as ferrying or carrying across, as transmission, transference, ‘Übersetzung’, or ‘translatio’. Further, similar metaphors could effortlessly extend the series. All convey the enabling function of translation. The enabling which translation brings about is to be achieved by a product, a finished translation, which is deemed to offer the user a reliable image of its parent text because it bears a close and pertinent resemblance to that which itself remains beyond reach. This is where we encounter the metaphors of translation as likeness, replica, duplicate, copy, portrait, reflection, reproduction, imitation, mimesis, mirror image or transparent pane of glass. Perhaps it is because these ways of speaking about translation look so familiar or even hackneyed to us that we are hardly aware of the metaphor hiding in a phrase such as ‘speaking through an interpreter’. What does it mean to speak through an interpreter? Or take the shorthand of a statement like ‘I have read Dostoevsky’, which means: what I read was a translation of Dostoevsky, but because it was a sound translation, it was, to all intents and purposes, practically the same as reading the original. One curious aspect of casual statements like these is their tendency to elide the translator’s intervention. Someone speaks right through an apparently DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-4

36  Approaches

disembodied interpreter, and like most other readers, I cannot remember the names of Dostoevsky’s translators. We feel we can be so casual about these statements, I suggest, because we construe translation as a form of delegated speech governed by the assumption of equivalence. Translators do not speak in their own name, they speak someone else’s words. The consonance of voices, but also the hierarchical relationship between them, is expressed in the ethical and often the legal imperative of the translator’s discretion and non-interference. Brian Harris once formulated this requirement as the ‘honest spokesperson’ or the ‘true interpreter’ norm (Harris 1990, 118). It calls on the translator to restate the original in another tongue, without addition, omission or distortion. The translator’s words appear, as it were, between inverted commas. Although the translator speaks the words, it is not the translator who speaks. The words of the original speaker are supposedly relayed to us with minimal, and ideally without mediation, by a wholly discreet, transparent, disenfranchised mediator. Two voices are telescoped into one. They are not fused; rather, one is subsumed into the other. Discretion and transparency, and the disenfranchisement they bring about, underwrite equivalence. Of course, we know that when we discuss translation in these terms, we are entertaining a fiction. A translation cannot double up with its donor text. It uses different words, which issue from a different source, in a different environment. A translation cannot, therefore, be equivalent with its original; it can only be declared equivalent by means of a performative speech act. Moreover, because the translator’s manual intervention cannot simply be neutralised or erased without trace, we shall have to come to terms with those traces. In what follows, I should like to illustrate this point by recalling, first, the presence of the translator’s ‘differential voice’ (the term is Barbara Folkart’s; 1991, 394) in translations, and, next, the implications of a norms-based approach to translation. This will provide the groundwork for suggesting that translations are untidy and partial rather than transparent representations of their base texts. I will then use that plank to address the paradoxes and aporias of our representations of translation. My argument will be that those representations are themselves translations and, therefore, also untidy and partial.

2.1 In contrast to the common requirement of the translator’s supposed discretion and non-interference, which demands that the translator remain invisible as a speaking subject, I want to maintain that translated texts, like other texts but more emphatically so, are necessarily plural, decentred, hybrid and polyphonic. The translator’s discursive presence, as a distinct voice and speaking position, hence, as what Folkart calls a ‘differential voice’, is always there, in the text itself. Many translations keep this voice well covered up and, hence, impossible to detect as a differential voice in the translated text itself. The resulting impression of homogeneity is what allows us to say that we have read Dostoevsky and

Paradoxes and Aporias [2002]  37

forget the translator’s name. Sometimes, however, incongruities open up within a text. They may be able to short-circuit our willing suspension of disbelief and reveal the basic contradiction in the attitude which accepts that translated texts are reoriented toward a different type of reader in a different linguistic and cultural environment while, nevertheless, expecting the agent, and the voice, that effected this reorientation to remain so discreet as to vanish altogether. In its simplest and crudest form, this kind of incongruity occurs, for example, in dubbed films, when the words being broadcast in translation are not properly synchronised with the actor’s lip movements on the screen. The audience may become aware of the discrepancy and realise that this is a translation, and, therefore, the voice we are hearing does not actually speak the words being mouthed on the screen. Subtitled films, or printed books which present bilingual or interlinear versions of original texts jointly with their translations, are equally revealing in this respect. The conference speaker whose words are being interpreted and who says, ‘This is me speaking now and not the interpreter’, creates an embarrassing but revealing situation: when interpreted, the statement contradicts itself because the words in translation are spoken by the interpreter, not the original speaker. The incongruity springs from the fact that, in a case like this, the ‘I’ of the utterance is not supposed to refer to the producer of that utterance, and yet it cannot help doing so, for such is the nature of the first-person pronoun. The ambivalence of the reference highlights the gap. Let me give a few more text-based examples. They bear on what Roman Jakobson calls the metalinguistic function of language, or what Jacques Derrida refers to as language ‘re-marking’ itself, thus, ironically drawing attention to itself. Marginal, paratextual comments by translators on their own performance rupture the apparently seamless web of a translated discourse. Wordplay sometimes calls for such interventions. In exploiting the economy of a particular language, wordplay constitutes that language’s ‘signature’ (Davis 1997), referring metalinguistically to the particular system onto which it is felicitously grafted. In rendering wordplay, translators may be able to handle the matter entirely in terms of the receptor language, without the reader of the translation being able to detect that a semantically very different constellation has been erected. In some cases, however, translators admit defeat and insert paratextual asides such as footnotes or bracketed comments. In so doing, they disrupt the discursive flow by pushing to the fore the voice we as readers were not supposed to be conscious of. The phenomenon is not restricted to humorous texts. It is very hard to read philosophers such as Martin Heidegger or Jacques Derrida in translation without being struck by the proliferation of apparently ‘untranslatable’ or otherwise indispensable, usually italicised German or French words between brackets. They remind us that everything that is not bracketed is translated. Put differently, they remind us of the overarching convention that governs the reading attitude as regards translations. The attitude we as readers bring to translations requires that we forget that the title page mentioned two names: the author’s and

38  Approaches

the translator’s. Consequently, suspending our disbelief, we read as if there had been only a single name. When the translator intervenes in the discourse, the self-reference of that explicit intervention jolts us out of the suspension of disbelief and reminds us of the conventionality of the convention. Something similar, and equally obvious, happens when a text containing words or phrases in another language is translated into this other language. In the letters of Vincent van Gogh, for example, we regularly encounter English phrases interspersed in the Dutch text. In the Penguin translation of Van Gogh’s letters, these phrases have been left untranslated – or they have been translated into themselves, if you prefer. However, in order to convey to the reader the surplus value of an original Dutch text featuring English words, the English version inserts a series of footnotes by the translator, acting as an editor of sorts, informing the reader that those particular words were already in English – which then reminds the reader that the rest of the text was not originally in English, so that it cannot have been Van Gogh who wrote all those other English words that are not footnoted. Perhaps cases like these are too crude to carry much conviction. Let me try to do better. Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Signature Event Context’ (1977a), as translated into English by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, abounds with bracketed French words signalling the limits of translatability as perceived by the translators. Some interventions are explicitly identified as stemming from ‘trans.’, as in one famous crux which appears with a bracketed amplification as ‘différance [difference and deferral, trans.]’ (Derrida 1977a, 179). On other occasions the translated discourse shows a degree of lexical instability which the translators appear to regard as unfortunate but inevitable. The repeated insertion of the same French term to match a variety of English renderings suggests as much. We read of ‘his intentions [vouloir-dire]’, ‘the desire to mean what one says [vouloir-dire]’, ‘its “original” desire-to-say-what-one-means [vouloirdire]’, ‘the presence of meaning [vouloir-dire]’ and ‘the exchange of intentions and meanings [vouloir-dire]’ (Derrida 1977a, 177, 181, 185, 191, 194). The translator’s presence makes itself felt through the marked contrast between the stability of the French term and the instability of its various context-bound approximations in English. In ‘Limited Inc abc …’, an elaborate response to John Searle’s critique of ‘Signature Event Context’, Derrida states, in so many words, that he is writing in French (‘I am trying to respond in French’; 1977b, 173), but because we read these words in English, the incongruity of the statement highlights the presence of two voices inhabiting the translated discourse. A couple of pages earlier, Derrida had introduced the French acronym ‘Sarl’ (Société à responsabilité limitée), which puns on the name of his opponent, Searle. Knowing that his essay would be translated into English, Derrida had directly addressed the translator with a request: ‘I ask that the translator leave this conventional expression in French and if necessary, that he explain things in a note’ (1977b, 170); the request is translated, and, indeed, it is met, leaving the duly italicised and untranslated acronym

Paradoxes and Aporias [2002]  39

as the visible evidence of the translator’s cooperative handiwork. Speaking positions are dramatised in the very performance of translation. More paradoxical is the passage in which Derrida, having used the term ‘fakeout’, carries on for a few sentences and then suddenly retraces his steps, wondering, ‘I cannot imagine how Sam Weber is going to translate “fake-out”’ (1977b, 213). This is a peculiar statement, for in the translation that we are reading, the term has already been translated by Sam Weber a few sentences earlier without a hitch. To explain why he thinks the translator will have a problem, Derrida returns to the French term contrepied (which now appears in the English text in French, untranslated) as it is defined in Littré’s French dictionary, a definition which we read quoted in English, down to a citation from La Fontaine – when ‘fake-out’, on its first occurrence in the English text we are reading, already covered contrepied in an unmarked, one-to-one matching. In anticipating what subsequently turned out to be a non-problem for the translator, Derrida has not only implicated the translator in the translation, but allowed us to register Sam Weber’s discursive presence in the curious situation in which, having already and perfectly adequately rendered contrepied as ‘fake-out’, the translator is taken back to the corresponding French term which he is now obliged to leave untranslated, and we end up reading, incongruously, in English, a French dictionary’s definition of a French word. Finally, a brief, more intertextual example. When some years ago David Luke brought out a new translation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, he added a preface which included several pages cataloguing alleged errors in the earlier translation of Mann’s novella by Helen Lowe-Porter. As a result, Luke’s own rendering pits itself not only against Mann’s German original but equally against Lowe-Porter’s English version. That makes it highly self-conscious and polemical. The reader who remembers the preface while reading the translation is bound to sense the double orientation, as Luke’s English words represent Mann’s German and at the same time distance themselves from Helen Lowe-Porter’s English. This second intertextual dimension, that of the translator in critical dialogue with another translator, betrays the presence of a speaking voice that is not reducible to that of the original author. Situations like these are common. They pertain to virtually all retranslations. The new Dutch Don Quixote by Barber van de Pol sets out to replace a 1963 version widely felt to be dull and outdated (Van de Pol 1994). This is what lends Van de Pol’s choice of words its deliberate, oppositional edge. It also signals a multidimensional rather than a two-dimensional agenda behind the performance of translation, an intertextuality which, however deep it lies buried, heightens the sense of the individuality of individual translations and, hence, of their own specific density and presence. All translations bounce off existing translations. In all these cases, we can ask: who exactly is speaking here? And if there is a hybrid, multivoiced speaking going on in translations, surely the kind of representation of an original that translation offers is slanted, and our conventional metaphors of translation as transparency are too simple. A voice, after

40  Approaches

all, betrays a subject-position, and positioned subjects embody views, opinions and values.

2.2 At this point, we can turn to the notion of translation norms. The idea of translating as decision-making has been around since Jiří Levý wrote about it in the 1960s. The concept of translation norms was introduced in an effort to explain why translators regularly make certain choices rather than others that also seem possible. The idea is broadly that norms present constraints on the individual’s behaviour while, at the same time, offering ready-made templates for action. Norms generate mutual expectations, dispositions, a habitus, in the way Pierre Bourdieu speaks of a habitus as a set of durable, transferable dispositions, both structured and structuring. As a result, norms make actions and choices more predictable throughout a community or parts thereof and, thus, help to circumscribe and regulate the field of translation. We can become aware of the polyphonic nature of translation by reflecting that its discourse gestures not just to a given source text but just as much, obediently or defiantly, to prevailing norms and modes of translating. Norms are informed by values and help to secure them. The content of a norm is a notion of what is regarded by a particular group as correct, proper or appropriate, and it carries an ideological load. If translating as a communicative and, therefore, a social activity is norm-governed, it follows that the entire operation of translation is filtered through the values which norms secure. This filtering extends from the selection and perception of a text to be translated, to the composition and orchestration of the translation itself and the responses to it. A good example to illustrate this point would be the translations produced by the Dutch neo-classicist society Nil Volentibus Arduum for the Amsterdam theatre in the 1670s and after. Their strongly held views on literary, social and moral propriety meant that they were prepared to drastically recast the foreign plays they translated into a mould they found acceptable. They slated original plays and translations that did not adhere to neo-classical principles as they understood them, and they replaced the translations they criticised with their own competing versions. They were spectacularly successful in their endeavours, monopolising the Amsterdam stage for decades and leaving a neo-classical legacy that lasted a hundred years. When John Payne translated Boccaccio into English in 1886 (The Decameron, Now First Completely Done into English Prose and Verse), his version may have been complete but it was not necessarily wholly intelligible. One passage, apparently regarded as too lewd for English eyes, had been rendered in an approximation of medieval French; in the second edition (1893), he left it in Italian. J.M. Rigg’s translation of 1903 (The Decameron, Faithfully Translated, with reprints in 1921 and 1930) likewise put offensive passages back into Italian rather than print them in translation. Clearly, it is not a lack of competence which is at stake here, but a

Paradoxes and Aporias [2002]  41

moral norm. When the critic E. Stuart Bates reviewed these and similar instances in his Modern Translation, he wholeheartedly approved of Payne’s and Rigg’s solutions (Bates 1936, 116–17). While these may be unusual cases, they illustrate the fact that the norms concept can be seen as a stronger version of the idea that all translation involves interpretation – ‘stronger’ in the sense that it suggests that interpretation is not just a natural given but an acquired social skill, involving evaluative as well as cognitive aspects and, hence, a range of parameters. The main point, however, is that norms implicate values in translation. Translation can then not be valuefree, neutral or transparent; nor can the translator be spirited away. But then, this is exactly where the cultural and historical interest of translation lies. Translation is of interest as a cultural phenomenon because of its lack of neutrality or innocence, because of its density, its specific weight and added value. If it were a merely mechanical exercise, it would be as interesting as a photocopier. It is more interesting than a photocopier because it presents us with an index of cultural self-reference, or, if you prefer, self-definition. The practice of translation comprises the selection and importation of cultural goods from outside a given circuit, and their transformation into terms which the receiving community can understand, if only in linguistic terms, and which it recognises, to some extent at least, as its own. And because each translation offers its own, overdetermined, distinct construction of the ‘otherness’ of the imported text, we can learn a great deal from these cultural constructions – and from the construction of self which accompanies them. The paradigms and templates which a culture uses to build images of the foreign offer privileged insight into self-definition.

2.3 What happens when we decide to pay sustained attention to translation for these reasons, when we want to investigate both the practice of and the discourse about translation across a wide cultural spectrum, historically and geographically, when we engage, that is, in the discipline called translation studies? What happens is that problems arise. It seems to me that the accounts which translation studies offers are beset by epistemological paradoxes which have not received the attention they deserve. To appreciate what is at stake, we can turn to Quentin Skinner’s essay ‘Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts’ (1970). Skinner addresses the problem, not of translation, but of how to assess what, with a term borrowed from speech act theory, he calls the ‘illocutionary force’ of statements that were made in the past by people who were addressing their contemporaries there and then, rather than us who live in the here and now. The problem, Skinner notes, is relevant to historians and anthropologists who ‘overhear’ those utterances. Erasmus responded to and wrote for his contemporaries, not for us. What do we, today, need in order to make sense of the words Erasmus wrote for his

42  Approaches

readers? Skinner represents the issue as involving a person A at a time and/or place t2 who is trying to make sense of an utterance by a speaker S who was speaking at a different time and/or place t1. Clearly, person A has to know enough about the concepts, language and conventions available to speaker S at time and/or place t1 to enable him or her to grasp the semantics of speaker S’s utterance and what force S’s enunciation of that utterance must have registered when it was uttered. But, Skinner goes on, it also seems indispensable that A should be capable of performing some act of translation of the concepts and conventions employed by S at t1 into terms which are familiar at t2 to A himself, not to mention others to whom A at t2 may wish to communicate his understanding. (1970, 136) Ethnographers and historians share this fundamental problem with travellers. How can the traveller, who has seen things radically different from what the people at home are used to, convey his or her impressions and make them intelligible? How can the ‘otherness’ of the other be described or represented to those who have not experienced it? How can we at t2 obtain a sense of a speaker S at t1, let alone of any utterances by S at t1? How can we recover otherness and make it available for inspection? Herodotus was both a historian and a traveller. François Hartog’s book The Mirror of Herodotus. The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History (1988) offers an analysis of Herodotus’s method, which revolves around the question: ‘How can the world being recounted be introduced in convincing fashion into the world where it is recounted?’ (Hartog 1988, 212). The answer is: by translating and inverting, by reducing difference to the opposite of sameness. This, as Hartog shows, is how Herodotus operates. He translates the foreign into Greek, both literally and figuratively; he makes the foreign intelligible by presenting it as the inverse of what the Greeks regard as familiar and normal. Among the Amazons, relations between the sexes which seem normal to the Greeks, are inverted. The nomadic Scythians, who take their houses with them on their wanderings, are the opposite of the urban, settled Athenians; what is a way of life for the Scythians was, for the Athenians, a temporary, forced episode during the Persian wars when they briefly abandoned their city and took to the mobile ‘wooden walls’ of their ships to evade the Persian army. The detail of the case does not concern us here. Nevertheless, it is instructive to put Herodotus alongside a modern metahistorian such as Hayden White. He worries about which linguistic model can best aid historians ‘in their work of translation’; he goes on to specify that ‘this is especially crucial for intellectual historians, who are concerned above all with the problem of meaning and that of translating between different meaning systems’ (White 1987, 189). As for ethnography, a discipline that did not really come into its own until the twentieth century, it may be sufficient, for now, to remember that almost half a century ago

Paradoxes and Aporias [2002]  43

one prominent fieldworker memorably described its central task as consisting in ‘the translation of culture’. More about this in a moment. What if someone is working in the field of translation studies, in which the documents, the utterances to be studied, are translations or statements about translation? The outcome seems unavoidable: we have to translate those translations. The problem which Quentin Skinner highlighted in general terms becomes acute for us as students of translation whenever we wish to speak about ‘translation’ as a transhistorical or transcultural phenomenon – when we attempt to grasp and then to describe and communicate in our linguistic and conceptual terms what members of another culture are doing when they engage in what looks, to us, like translation or what they mean by whatever terms they use for an activity or a product that appears to translate as our ‘translation’. If this is correct, then it has consequences for translation studies. One obvious consequence is that when we study translation as it occurs in other cultures, we have no option but to translate into our terms those practices and concepts. In describing translation, we are also translating translation. We perform the very operations we are attempting to describe. This is especially troubling for descriptive and historical studies because those approaches have not only tried hard to separate the object-level – translations – from the metalevel – descriptions of translations – but they have stressed the scholarly nature of their own discourse in the process. The distinction now turns out to be much less neat than we may have wanted it to be. Instead of a tidy division between object-level and metalevel there is an untidy entanglement and contamination of the two (as Bakker 1995 has pointed out). The metalevel is compromised because it is performing that which it is simultaneously trying to describe at the object-level. The epistemological implications of this complicity are unnerving. Moreover, if our descriptions of translation are also translations of translation, then the logic of my argument points to the conclusion that our translations are partial in every sense of the word. We translate according to a concept of translation and into a concept of translation, in a manner which draws in differential voices and is filtered through local values.

2.4 There is no escape from these predicaments, but we can learn from them. We can also learn from parallel cases, from disciplines which are just as deeply entangled in translation as translation studies are but which have shown themselves perhaps more aware of the theoretical and methodological implications. We could look, for instance, to such fields as ethnography and cultural anthropology (Asad 1986; Bachmann-Medick 1997; Sturge 1997). Back in 1973, the anthropologist Edmund Leach suggested that, for his discipline, ‘the essential problem is one of translation’ and concluded that ‘social anthropologists are engaged in establishing a methodology for the translation of cultural language’ (in Asad 1986, 142). However, the anthropologists have since found that establishing this

44  Approaches

’methodology for the translation of cultural language’ is a formidable task. Let me mention a couple of examples to illustrate the difficulty. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Jesuits were trying to convert the Chinese to Christianity, they needed to express concepts such as ‘God’, ‘heaven’, ‘soul’ and ‘sin’ in Chinese. In 1604, Matteo Ricci wrote his treatise on The True Meaning of the Master of Heaven in Chinese, but the only terms available to him were those which echoed Confucian and Buddhist usage. As a result, the Christian concepts he wanted to convey were locked in discourses that were incommensurable with Christian metaphysics (Gernet 1985, 48–9, 146–7). The Jesuits made huge conceptual efforts to find common ground between the Confucian and Christian worldviews, and their solutions remained controversial. When, in the late 1920s, the literary critic I.A. Richards was trying to understand the ancient Chinese philosopher Meng Tzu, he faced a similar problem, but the other way round. In attempting to gauge the range of meanings of key Chinese terms, he developed what he called a ‘technique of multiple definition’, mapping the semantic field and different contexts and usages of the Chinese terms without pinning himself down on a single term as its translation (Richards 1932). What Richards did with Chinese philosophy, the Oxford ethnographer Edward Evans-Pritchard did when he studied the beliefs of the Nuer in southern Sudan in the 1940s and 1950s. Evans-Pritchard emphasised the radical incompatibility of Nuer words and concepts with Western, Christian terms. His book Nuer Religion (1956) highlights the Western ethnographer’s formidable problem of understanding something which is utterly alien, let alone of rendering it in a language like English, whose terms are tainted by the concepts, the history and the values of the Christian West. It was Evans-Pritchard who, in 1951, described the central task of ethnography as ‘the translation of culture’ (Needham 1978, 8). Evans-Pritchard’s account of Nuer beliefs formed, in turn, the subject of a book by Rodney Needham, whose Belief, Language, and Experience (1972) offers an extended reflection on the perplexing problems of this ‘translation of culture’. Needham points out, for example, that, if we want to compare Nuer concepts with their Western interpretations, we need a metalanguage to carry out the comparison. Such a metalanguage presupposes the comparability of cultural concepts, and the concepts can only be compared on the basis of a suitable metalanguage. The endeavour lands us in a vicious circle – a real aporia (Needham 1972, 222). We cannot escape from perspectival observation, value-ridden interpretation, compromised and compromising translation. What can we learn from all this? As far as I can see, even among professional ethnographers, the question of how to comprehend, interpret and translate concepts belonging to distant cultural worlds and distant language-worlds remains without a clear answer. But ethnographers have articulated the kind of issues that are involved, and they have sought to address them. As a result, ethnography has become a markedly self-reflexive and self-critical discipline, aware of its own

Paradoxes and Aporias [2002]  45

historicity and its institutional position, of its presuppositions and blind spots and of the non-transparency of representation by means of language and translation. How can we bring about this kind of self-reflexiveness in speaking or writing about translation? Although I do not presume to have the answer, I think it is essential to create, within the discourse about translation, a certain self-critical distance. Let me, by way of conclusion, and very briefly, risk three suggestions for bringing such a self-critical distance about. What they have in common is the dramatisation of the process of making sense of the foreign construct and the attempt to render explicit the position from which the analyst is speaking, even if, as my third suggestion shows, there can never be a stable, ultimate position to work from. The first suggestion is modern hermeneutics, as it is theorised and practised, for example, in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work. The hermeneutic critic seeks ‘understanding’ in the full knowledge that the search is inevitably located somewhere, that it serves a certain agenda and is predicated on various assumptions, presuppositions and prejudices. In reflecting upon the modalities of its own struggle to understand, hermeneutics constantly reminds itself of its own situation. It seeks to reconcile historical self-awareness with respect for the other’s difference and attempts to fuse these two in the form of exchange and dialogue. The second suggestion is narrativity, which is the line taken in much postmodern ethnography. An interesting theoretical reflection on postmodern forms that intermingle narrative with analysis is offered in Mieke Bal’s essay ‘First Person, Second Person, Same Person: Narrative as Epistemology’ (Bal 1993). The essay approves of the equation of transcription with translation and of description with narrating. More importantly, it argues that the narrative mode invites the mapping of ‘positioned subjects’, primarily an ‘I’ and a ‘you’, and that this enables it to steer clear of an illusory objectivism. By switching into narrative gear, the speaker or writer can show not only how meaning is being constituted rather than taking it as being preformed but also how the material is focalised – that is, from what angle the narrator makes us view the material under scrutiny. The third suggestion is Niklas Luhmann’s concept of second-order observation, or the observation of observation. If we think of someone who studies translation as being engaged in observing translation, describing it, tracing the practice of translation in a particular domain, historically or otherwise, then we can see that activity as first-order observation: a researcher observes an object, makes distinctions to analyse it and so on. A second-order observer would be interested in how the researcher observes his or her object, by means of what distinctions and translative operations. We could envisage this activity as a deconstructive practice, and there are, indeed, significant similarities between second-order observation and deconstruction, in that both are interested in revealing those distinctions and criteria to which the first-order observer remains necessarily blind (Luhmann 1993). Of course, the practice of observing how sense is being made will not yield ultimate answers for two reasons: the second-order observer also needs to ‘translate’ the translative

46 

Approaches

operations with which the first-order observer appears to operate, and, like every observer, a second-order observer will have his or her own blind spot and can, in turn, be observed, just as every deconstructive analysis can, in turn, be deconstructed. Each of these attempts – and there are others – to locate the analyst in relation to what is being analysed takes us well beyond translation and the traditional domain of translation studies. The aporia that opens up once we realise that the study of translation translates translation and does so in compromised and compromising ways, obliges us to reconsider not just what we know but also how we know what we think we know. If the discipline of translation studies is to engage critically with its own operations and its conditions of acquiring knowledge, it needs to look beyond its own borders.

Bibliography Asad, Talal. 1986. ‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology’. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, 141–64. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bachmann-Medick, Doris, ed. 1997. Übersetzung als Repräsentation fremder Kulturen. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Bakker, Matthijs. 1995. ‘Metasprong en wetenschap: Een kwestie van discipline’. In Vertalen historisch bezien, edited by Dirk Delabastita and Theo Hermans, 141–62. The Hague: Stichting Bibliographia Neerlandica. Bal, Mieke. 1993. ‘First Person, Second Person, Same Person: Narrative as Epistemology’. New Literary History 24, 293–320. Bates, E. Stuart. 1936. Modern Translation. Oxford & London: Oxford University Press. Davis, Kathleen. 1997. ‘Signature in Translation’. In Traductio: Essays on Punning and Translation, edited by Dirk Delabastita, 23–43. Manchester & Namur: St Jerome. Derrida, Jacques. 1977a. ‘Signature Event Context’. Translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Glyph 1, 172–97. Derrida, Jacques. 1977b. ‘Limited Inc abc…’. Translated by Samuel Weber. Glyph 2, 162–254. Evans-Pritchard, Edward. 1956. Nuer Religion. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Folkart, Barbara. 1991. Le conflit des énonciations. Traduction et discours rapporté. Candiac: Editions de Balzac. Gernet, Jacques. 1985. China and the Christian Impact: A Conflict of Cultures. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Brian. 1990. ‘Norms in Interpretation’. Target 2, 115–19. Hartog, François. 1988. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Berkeley & London: University of California Press. Hermans, Theo. 1996. ‘The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative’. Target 8, 23–48. Hermans, Theo. 1999. ‘Translation and Normativity’. In Translation and Norms, edited by Christina Schäffner, 50–71. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Luhmann, Niklas. 1993. ‘Deconstruction as Second-Order Observing’. New Literary History 24, 763–82.

Paradoxes and Aporias [2002]  47

Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language, and Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Needham, Rodney. 1978. Essential Perplexities. Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press. Richards, I.A. 1932. Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition. London: Paul, Trench and Trubner. Schneider, W.G. 1992. ‘Hermeneutik Sozialer Systeme. Konvergenzen zwischen Systemtheorie und philosophischer Hermeneutik’. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 21, 420–39. Skinner, Quentin. 1970. ‘Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts’. The Philosophical Quarterly 20, 118–38. Sturge, Kate. 1997. ‘Translation Strategies in Ethnography’. The Translator 3, 21–38. Van de Pol, Barber. 1994. ‘De erfenis van een vertaler’. Raster 66, 142–56. Van Gogh, Vincent. 1996. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Translated by Arnold Pomerans. London: Penguin. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content of the Form. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

3 TRANSLATION, IRRITATION AND RESONANCE [2007]

Can we imagine translation without translators? However perverse it may seem in the context of understanding translation as a social practice, I should like to sketch a sociological perspective on translation that chooses to write translators out of the picture. Still, let me begin with translators. We can then watch them disappear, not once, but twice.

3.1 Equivalence and Intertextuality First, here are three scenarios, assembled around the well-worn issue of equivalence. I present them very briefly because they serve merely as the run-up to other things. Anyone even remotely familiar with the history of translation in the West will know the story of the Septuagint. Told many times since the famous letter of Aristeas in the second century BCE, it revolves around the 70 Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible in Alexandria who all worked independently of each other yet produced identical renderings. God had apparently breathed the one correct version into the translators' ears, hence the remarkable result. The story of the miracle evidently serves the purpose of investing the Greek rendition with a status equal to that of the Hebrew original. For Saint Augustine, God spoke with the same intent and with equal authority in both versions. Perhaps not everyone who has read around in more recent translation history has come across the story of the Book of Mormon, very similar to that of the Septuagint but, perhaps, even more spectacular. The detail of how, in the 1820s, in Western New York, Joseph Smith managed to translate into English an unknown script from a collection of gold plates which he had dug up following the directions of the angel Moroni would take too long here (the story is told in Hill 1977; Persuitte 1985; Robinson 2001, 54–61). The defining moment of this intriguing tale DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-5

Translation, Irritation & Resonance [2007]  49

occurred when, in July 1829, the translation was ready, and Joseph Smith's associates were allowed to see and touch the mysterious gold plates as the assembled company witnessed another visitation from Moroni. During these proceedings, a voice descended from heaven declaring that ‘the book is true and the translation accurate’. The angel then took the gold plates under his wing and vanished with them, for good. They have not been seen since. The physical removal of the original sealed the divine pronouncement, the proclamation from on high which endowed the translation with a value equal to that of the original. The pronouncement, that is, made translation and original equivalent. In so doing, it enabled the translation to displace the original, which, indeed, was no longer needed and could be taken away without loss. If not everyone interested in the recent and current history of translation knows about the Convention of Vienna, this is unfortunate because, in one way or another, it affects every country on the globe and, therefore, every one of us as citizens. The United Nations' Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, first adopted in 1969, governs international treaties. Such treaties normally exist in the form of parallel texts in several languages. If some of these versions have come into existence as translations, they cease to be translations as soon as the multilingual treaty is agreed upon by the relevant parties as constituting one single legal instrument. ‘Agreeing’ here means that the parallel texts of the treaty are authenticated, that is, recognised as equivalent sources for the interpretation of the treaty. From that moment onward, the translations become versions which all possess equal value in law and are, on that basis, presumed to have the same meaning. Indeed Paragraph 3 of Article 33 of the Convention of Vienna states that ‘The terms of a treaty are presumed to have the same meaning in each authentic text’ (Reuter 1995, 261). All the key documents of the European Union (EU), for instance, are, in this sense, equal, equivalent and definitive versions in all of the EU’s official languages, even though, with the organisation's successive expansions over the years, we can be certain that most of them started out as translations. The perspective I am adopting here is that, when, in a particular institutional context, a translation has successfully been declared equivalent with its donor text, it is no longer a translation. It has graduated to a version on a par with other versions (including the original original), all of which are now deemed to be equally authoritative, animated by the same authorial intent and, therefore, presumed to have the same meaning. The Book of Mormon dramatised the point by spiriting away the now redundant original. The Convention of Vienna forbids those interpreting authenticated versions of an international treaty from privileging a version known to have served at an earlier stage as a source of translation for the other version(s). Doing so would undermine authentication, which institutes legal parity. One obvious consequence of authentication is that, having instituted equivalence, it does away with translation. And when there is no translation, there cannot be a translator. A successful declaration of equivalence spells the end of

50  Approaches

translation and evicts the translator. Joseph Smith and the Seventy who penned the Septuagint acted as mere conduits for divine messages. The different language versions of the amalgamated EU Treaty do not have names of translators appended to them. Here we witness the translator's first disappearance. At least three things follow from this. First, translations cannot be equivalent to their originals. They may pursue equivalence, as many translations do, but if they attain it, they cease to be translations. Upon fulfilling their most ambitious aim, at the moment of sublimation, they self-destruct, and the translator vanishes with them. Second, for as long as translations fall short of their highest ambition and continue to function as translations, they cannot be definitive. In contrast to the EU Treaty, which exists in a single definitive version in each of the EU’s official languages, there always remains room, in any given language, for more than one translation of any particular document. Translations are repeatable, they can be attempted again and again. Third, because translations are repeatable, each translation has a translator's subject-position written into it. Perhaps this point needs a brief illustration. Although any translation will do for the purpose, let me pick one that is more explicit than most. Here are a few lines from the diary of Anne Frank as printed in Laureen Nussbaum's section on Anne Frank in a collection called Women Writing in Dutch (1994): I must keep my head high and be brave, those thoughts will come {all the same}, not once, but oh, countless times. Believe me, if you have been shut up [confined] for a year and a half, it can get too much for you some days. In spite of all justice [ fairness] and thankfulness, you can't crush [repress] your feelings. (Nussbaum 1994, 552; original emphasis) The unusual typography is due to the fact that, as Nussbaum explains in her ­preface and notes, she had made her own translation of parts of Anne Frank's diary for Women Writing in Dutch but had run into trouble. She had seen the standard translation of the diary by B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday and had felt unhappy with it. Having done what she regarded as a better job, she requested permission from the copyright holder to print her rendering but was refused. Mightily annoyed but faced with no alternative except that of dropping the entire chapter from the book, she reproduced the Mooyaart-Doubleday rendering but peppered it with her own suggestions for improvement. They appear in italics and between square brackets and accolade marks, as shown above. Now, if Nussbaum had simply reproduced the Mooyaart-Doubleday translation without adding her own suggestions, it would have looked like this: I must keep my head high and be brave, those thoughts will come, not once, but oh, countless times. Believe me, if you have been shut up for a

Translation, Irritation & Resonance [2007]  51

year and a half, it can get too much for you some days. In spite of all justice and thankfulness, you can't crush your feelings. Of course, Nussbaum would have much preferred to be able to print her own rendering. Had she been granted permission to do so, it would have looked like this: I must keep my head high and be brave, those thoughts will come all the same, not once, but oh, countless times. Believe me, if you have been confined for a year and a half, it can get too much for you some days. In spite of all fairness and thankfulness, you can't repress your feelings. My point is simply that this translation, had it been allowed into print in this form, challenges the previous translator's choices just as vigorously as the one featuring accolade marks and square brackets. Even if the polemic is less visibly marked in this last version, it, too, critically engages the other translation, and it does so over the head of the original. Nussbaum's version hosts an angry debate in which one translator takes issue with a fellow translator about questions of register and accuracy in translation. It inscribes a subject-position that can only be the translator's, not the original author's. It does more than that. It opens up an intertextual dimension specific to the field of translation. Beyond the immediate reference to the previous version, there is a more generic appeal to other translations of this type, and beyond those resonances, there lies what Gérard Genette (1979) might call an architextual appeal to a broad sedimented notion of translation as such – a socially relevant concept of legitimate, proper translation. In other words, the translation invokes not just another translation but also other translations and, by extension, translation as a generic and historical category. In addition, and now looking forward rather than backward, Nussbaum's rendering demonstrates the repeatability and provisionality of translation. The criticism of the predecessor that is inscribed in Nussbaum's version reminds us that any individual rendition offers only one of a number of possible ways of representing the original in translation. A new translation may seek to replace one or more existing versions, but it will not be the last in line, and it may, in turn, be overtaken by others. Further alternative renderings remain possible. Let me delve into this issue a little more. In any given translation there is a latent gesturing toward additional possibilities and alternative renderings. This gesturing accompanies individual translations inasmuch as they can always be attempted again. The text of a translation, as we read it on the page, represents a series of choices that, in turn, point to a virtual reservoir in which all the unselected, excluded – but potentially valid – alternative choices are stored. Each retranslation taps into the reservoir, without, of course, ever exhausting it. While the production of a new translation shows the underlying original to be translatable, the provisionality of the rendering intimates the dimension of

52 

Approaches

the untranslatable, understood here as the impossibility of arriving at a definitive version. A definitive version, as suggested earlier, would spell the end of translation. The potential for retranslation, thus, undermines any claim an individual translation may have to be the original's sole representative. Consequently, while no translation can act as sole representative of a given original, every translation can lay claim to be a representation of it, in the double sense of the word: representation as proxy (as speaking or standing in for, as mouthpiece, delegate, ambassador) and as resemblance (replica, copy, mirrorimage, simulation, interpretation). None, however, can claim to be the original's exclusive mouthpiece or the only possible copy of it. Retranslations can challenge any existing translation. The modern world possesses an instrument that can put a stop to the potentially endless profusion of retranslations. The instrument has a name: copyright law. It can halt the dissemination of rival versions by granting one version the exclusive right to act as proxy and, therefore, as the only permitted (not: the only possible) replica of a given original. Copyright law can also be used to prevent translation as such, or at least it can prevent translations from entering the public domain. But it can do all this for a brief period of time only, currently up to 70 years after the author's death. When copyright expires, the free-for-all resumes. In this way, copyright law serves as a reminder that the untranslatability I mentioned above is rolled out over time. It can be held up for a while, for maybe a century or so, but is unstoppable in the longer term, as each translation contains the potential for retranslations. Put differently, as translation remains forever repeatable and provisional, every rendering potentialises others. In the same way, the choices made in individual translations merely temporalise the excluded alternatives; it puts them on a reserve list.

3.2. Social Systems In talking of things such as copyright law and temporalisation, social and historical horizons come into view. What does translation look like if viewed as a social practice? To pick one paradigm from among several on offer, what would translation look like if viewed through the lens of social systems theory, the type of lens that has been ground and polished by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in particular? Translators would not be part of such a system. They would be presupposed, as would be all sorts of material preconditions. Here, we encounter the translator's second disappearance. In social systems theory, translators are not part of any social system because, like other human beings, they are composed of minds and bodies, and neither minds nor bodies are social. Systems theory, as Luhmann developed it,1 conceives of minds as psychic systems and of bodies as biological systems. The human body is encased within its owner's skin, and that is its outer limit. The body needs the outside world because it must take in air and food, but its functioning is an internal matter. In the same way, the mind needs sense

Translation, Irritation & Resonance [2007]  53

perceptions but then goes on to process thoughts and feelings in its own way. This processing, too, is an internal matter, just as digestion is internal to the body. Another way of putting this is to say that both minds and bodies function autonomously. Biological cells reproduce; thoughts feed on thoughts and trigger further thoughts. None of these processes is social. Minds cannot reach into other minds or transmit thoughts. I cannot read your mind, and you cannot read mine. What we can do is communicate. If we think of what it is that makes the social social, we end up with what happens not within but between individuals. That is why Luhmann defines social systems as systems consisting of communications. Communication requires thoughtful minds, talking heads and functioning bodies, but its social nature comes to the fore when it takes place in the interpersonal sphere. The participating bodies and minds are not themselves social. What is social is the to and fro of communicative exchange, as one communication hooks into another, and their linkage starts building a chain over time. This concatenation is an ongoing concern in which the event character of individual communications is crucial. Communication happens. It does not linger. Communications have to connect if the system is to get going and to keep going. Signals have to be picked up, made sense of and responded to. Communication, the key to it all, is conceived here as the coincidence of utterance, information and understanding. In this account, ‘utterance’ (Luhmann's German term is Mitteilung) stands for the communicative act, the performative aspect of communication. Information, the constative aspect, concerns what the utterance is about. It refers to something outside the communicative act itself. If information presents a communication’s external reference, then utterance is its self-reference. Understanding (Verstehen) then means observing the unity of the difference between utterance and information: a receiver construes a speaker as saying something. It may be worth adding a few footnotes to this idea of communication. First, communication, in this model, begins with understanding. That is, it begins with the receiver, not with the sender. Understanding means that the receiver grasps both utterance and information as selections, ascribing a communicative intent to the sender and assuming that the topic that is broached is of relevance in one way or another. It gets underway when a receiver responds to a communication and, in turn, finds a responsive receiver. Second, the model is inferential. Making sense of a communication is a matter of drawing inferences from a signal. Communication is not transfer or the transmission of pre-existing content via a conduit such as language. Instead, we have the same stimulus and inference model that also underpins Relevance theory. Applying this model to translation will mean sacrificing the metaphors of packaging and transportation dear to traditional conceptualisations of translation. Third, inference leaves room for misunderstanding. Or better, misunderstanding is that apparent mismatch between intended and construed meaning that can only be established by making it the theme of further communicative exchanges, which themselves require inferential interpretation.

54  Approaches

Before we return to translation, we need a few additional general points. Here, then, brutally simplified, are some essentials of Luhmann’s social systems theory – Luhmann on the back of an envelope, so to speak. 1. Communications are fleeting events; therefore, they must be connected. To do this, the system scans and latches on to communications selectively. Of all the possible meanings a given communication proffers, only some are retained and used to trigger connecting communications, which are, again, filtered out and made sense of selectively. In this way, communication generates communication. The system continually recycles and modifies its own elements. It is self-reproducing or autopoietic in this sense. 2. By doing this recursively and self-referentially over a period of time, and by selectively remembering and forgetting, a certain stabilisation comes about. Networks and structures are built up that make certain communications more likely and, therefore, more predictable than others. The structures of a social system are structures of expectation. We need expectations to counter the double contingency that rules all things interpersonal and that consists in our inability to read each other’s intentions or to fully predict each other’s behaviour. As specific structures and expectations begin to cluster around certain kinds of communication, individual systems differentiate themselves from what is around them. 3. Luhmann thinks of modern society as consisting of a large number of functionally differentiated social systems. Whereas, in earlier periods of history, the dominant forms of social organisation were segmentation (as in clan systems) and hierarchical stratification (as in feudal societies), the form of society in the industrial and postindustrial world is characterised by systems which specialise, so to speak, in performing certain socially necessary functions, such as producing collectively binding decisions (politics), the management of scarce resources (the economy), or maintaining social order through the distinction between permissible legal and punishable illegal acts. 4. The various function systems of modern society that Luhmann has described in detail (the economy, politics, law, education, religion, art, the sciences, the mass media and organisations but also social and protest movements) are, perhaps, best thought of as discourse networks. Each privileges certain kinds of communication and will process communications in its own way. There is, however, no superordinate system to keep the various function systems in check. Society as a whole, as the conglomerate of these function systems, manages without a centre, without a common direction and without an overarching purpose. 5. Each function system is organised around an embedded matrix, a guiding difference or schema – Luhmann speaks of a ‘code’ – that provides a basic orientation for its operations. For instance, the system of science is guided by a schema that distinguishes what it sees as true, and, therefore, tenable, from

Translation, Irritation & Resonance [2007]  55

false, and, therefore, untenable. Everything that happens in the sciences is meant, ultimately, to revolve around the pursuit of true rather than false statements about the world. 6. Programmes flesh out a system's code and render it operational. In the sciences, for example, they endow truth with a positive value and furnish criteria to tell truth from falsehood. Because these criteria are not self-evident, the programmes of the sciences result in the welter of competing approaches and schools of thought that inspire research and debate. Other systems have their own programmes clustering around and giving substance to their specific codes. Whereas a system's code is highly abstract but relatively stable, programmes are more concrete and variable. 7. Luhmann thinks of the major function systems of the modern world – the economy, politics, law and science – as rather self-centred networks that read everything that happens around them in their own terms. Politicians translate the moral pronouncements of religious figures into their own vocabulary and interests. The commercial sector puts a price on art on the basis of criteria that are common currency in the business community but may well be at odds with those employed in the art world. Natural catastrophes trigger very different responses among environmentalists, the news media, medical staff and insurance companies, for instance. Luhmann calls these reflexes ‘operative closure’. Whatever systems take from their environment, they convert into their own currency, just as they draw on their own resources for their operations. 8. Even though each system has its own currency, systems can irritate one another, and they all do so all the time. Church leaders know their words resonate among politicians, and politicians realise they will do well to monitor developments in the churches. The monetary value of works of art affects the art world. Irritation is merely another word for the stimulus and inference idea mentioned above. It implies that a system is not impervious to its environment, even though it will make its own sense of any stimulus that comes its way. In other words, it transforms irritation into information. National news media may promote nation-building, but they do so through their primary function of garnering and disseminating news stories. This means the environment can intervene only indirectly into the system. It can produce resonance, but direct intervention would erase the difference between system and environment and that would wipe out the system. 9. Systems are interdependent. Communication needs functioning bodies and minds, just as bodies need communication and minds, and minds need bodies and communication. Social systems, too, interact. The business sector knows that levels of taxation may go up or down following an election, and it plans for such an eventuality, even to the extent of seeking to influence politicians. Schools may start teaching creationism alongside or even instead of evolution theory because of evangelical lobbies. Luhmann calls these correlations ‘structural coupling’. The term means that a system develops

56 

Approaches

structures that also suit the demands of other systems so that various systems can coexist while retaining their own identity and their specific difference. If operative closure suggests autonomy, structural coupling points toward heteronomy. Structural coupling conditions a system's autonomy but does not determine it. 10. A system operates by means of distinctions to obtain and process information, and in this sense, a social system is an observing system. When a system observes itself by means of its own constitutive difference – that is, when it re-enters the basic distinction that renders it distinct – it can generate self-descriptions. When such self-descriptions focus on the system as a whole, they become reflection theories. Self-descriptions and reflection theories typically re-enter the system's constitutive difference into their own observation of that system. If the sciences operate with a distinction between true and false, epistemological theories within the sciences re-enter that distinction to reflect on the nature of science. To the extent that this becomes a matter of observing, within the sciences, how the sciences observe the world, we have observation of observation or second-order observation.

3.3 Translation as a Social System Can we describe translation along these lines? Let me stress that I am not interested in claiming that translation is a social system. That would mean making an ontological or essentialist claim, and the constructivist nature of systems theory militates against such claims. Systems exist in systems theory. Whether they have an objective existence outside it is a question systems theory cannot resolve. The translation system exists to the extent that a plausible case for this proposition can be made in system-theoretic terms. In other words, we can view translation through a system-theoretic lens with the aim of gaining a fresh perspective, a way of focusing attention. In that sense, I want to consider translation as a social system and see what emerges. What emerges is a system that comprises communications perceived as or concerned with translation – in other words, translations and discourses about translation. But communications, as we saw, are events. That means the translation system does not consist so much of translations as objects, such as written texts or spoken words, but of the innumerable communicative acts that count as translations or contribute to its self-observation. Perhaps the fluidity of oral interpreting rather than the fixity of translated print offers the prototype of translation. The system's unity, its own sense of being distinct, derives from its function, the role the system assigns to itself. The function of the translation system, I would suggest, is to extend society's communicative range, typically across natural languages. The system fulfils this function by producing communications that circulate as representations of communications on the other side of an intelligibility barrier such as a natural language. The system's function also provides

Translation, Irritation & Resonance [2007]  57

its code. As the translation system's code, I regard the notion of representation in the double sense indicated above as proxy and resemblance, prototypically in the form of interlingual re-enactment. In other words, representation organises the system and renders it distinct. You know you are dealing with a communication that belongs to the translation system if it is an instance of or bears on representation as proxy and resemblance, especially if it appears as interlingual reenactment. ‘Proxy’ refers to the idea of translation as a form of delegated speech, ‘resemblance’ to translation as displaying similarity with the speech being represented. Put differently, translation is second-order discourse that represents another discourse. The translation system emerges as communications of the same type begin to cluster. When this chatter gains volume and momentum and the system differentiates itself, programmes – prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences and permissions, that is, the whole complex of norms and expectations governing particular modes of representation – flesh it out, provide backbone and structure and unfold it over time. As it unfolds, structural coupling ensures the system's ability to interact with the environment and its readiness to absorb the irritations the environment has in store. For example, the translation system may become aware that, as a rule, translations have to slot into existing text types, and it will develop appropriate representational modes to ensure its products will fit. The current debates about localisation are a case in point: the specific requirements of globalised websites stimulate the translation system into generating adequate forms of representation. The Anne Frank example, too, was about producing the most appropriate kind of representation for a certain type of text. But whether it is dealing with localisation or with Anne Frank, the system has to decide for itself, with reference to its own resources and procedures, what kind of communication to bring about. If it did not do this, it would not be self-referential, it would not be autopoietic, and it would, therefore, not be a system. The basic tension in the system is that between autopoiesis and structural coupling, autonomy and heteronomy, self-reference and external reference. As the self-reference of translation, I regard that aspect of a translated text that refers, more or less self-consciously, to the particular mode of representation it has selected for itself. I will return to this later. The other aspect, a translation's external reference, that which a translation talks about in addition to being a replica of an earlier communication, lends itself to appropriation by other systems. It helps a translated text to live out its life as a translated degree certificate or historical novel, an interpreted speech or a localised website. In other words, and in the modern world, the internal differentiation of the translation system mirrors its differentiated environment, the various client systems with which it interacts. We are dealing with structural coupling in that the translation system copies into itself the differentiation it perceives in its environment so as to be able to mesh with a range of particular client systems – the medical world, the legal profession, finance, literature, journalism and so on.

58 

Approaches

Internal differentiation means that the translation system gains in complexity, enabling it to cope with a complex world. Paradoxically, the growth in complexity also reduces the room for manoeuvre, as the system's various subdivisions are tied to specific sets of client demands. Nevertheless, because of the system's own momentum, the fact that it translates into its own terms the demands of its clients and accommodates them into its own structures, there can be no oneto-one correspondence between translation and its client systems. Resonance cannot be dictated. Hence, there remains the possibility of friction, mismatch and conflict. The translation system may throw up peculiarities which a client system perceives as noise, as outrageous or obnoxious. These may concern issues of what constitutes a valid representation or a well-formed text, but they may equally be ethical matters and normative ideas regarding what translation can be and what translators should do. All of them arise from debates within the translation system. In the same way, a client system may irritate the translation system by voicing demands about what kinds of texts it wants to see. If this is the basic scaffolding for a systems approach to translation, we can go on to investigate several aspects, from translation history to translator training. In what follows, I will explore just two dimensions: the ‘form’ of translation and second-order observation.

3.4 The Form of Translation To explain what I mean by the form of translation, we may go back for a moment to the idea of translation as a specific kind of communication. Relevance theory names this specificity the interpretive (as against the descriptive) use of language. It means that translations are treated as secondary discourses, as metatexts; they report on other texts rather than speaking directly (‘descriptively’, in Relevance theory parlance) about the world (Gutt 1991). As metatextual communications, translations invoke the distinction between utterance and information. Information may, here, be understood as covering what Andrew Chesterman (1996) calls ‘relevant resemblance’. It is what a translation is about, its external reference, its resemblance to another text. The utterance is then the presentation and delivery of that resemblance, the translator speaking for someone else. Note that ‘translator’, here, stands for a discursive identity, a point of reference, not a real person; physical bodies belong not to the social system but to its environment. The utterance points up a double frame; it announces reported speech, and then it performs that reporting. To see this more clearly, we might think of a translation that comes with a translator's preface. The preface frames the translation in the way quotation marks frame a quotation or a main clause frames an embedded clause. The frame also sets the scene and provides clues on how to read the simulation that follows. Assuming there is no glaring conflict between announcement and simulation, the actual rendition is then merely the dramatisation of the particular translative option, the performance of the mode of

Translation, Irritation & Resonance [2007]  59

representation announced in the preface. As a result, the performance is altered; we no longer see an underlying text being performed, we see the performance of a text being performed in a certain key. The actor who announces he is going to act Hamlet acts Hamlet like an actor demonstrating a particular way of acting Hamlet. I am suggesting that reading translations as translations, that is, as metatexts, with or without a preface, perhaps just using the bare mention of the word ‘translation’ on the title page as a cue, means entering into a contract according to which translation operates as demonstration. This approach accords with the view of translation as quoting, since quotation can readily be thought of as an instance of demonstration (Mossop 1983, 1998; Clark and Gerrig 1990). The demonstration consists of the re-enactment of a pre-existing text and, because it is framed as a demonstration, of the display of a certain re-enacting style. In other words, translations can be read not only with reference to the originals they represent and not only for what they say about whatever they and their originals speak about outside themselves. They can also be read for what they say about their individual way of re-enacting an original as well as, more generally, about the kind of re-enactment that is called translation. In this perspective, each individual rendition exhibits a particular mode of representation profiled against the ever-present possibility of alternative modes and other performances. As, over time, translations intertextually endorse or berate one another along the lines discussed with reference to the Anne Frank example earlier, the form of translation is condensed and confirmed into a series of patterns for further use. It is condensed in that a particular mode of representation can be applied again at a later moment and will still be recognised as being the same mode. It is confirmed in that the same mode can be applied in different circumstances and, thus, extend its range while still remaining the same mode. The form of translation, then, is what emerges as the historical set of communicative practices that become recognisable as translation because certain modes of representation are selected again and again. It is performed as translations are produced over time and representational modes are selected and reselected, and it is reflected in the programmes fleshing out the schema of translation. The programmes are not uniform. Because in the modern world translation caters to an array of differentiated function systems, it is also itself differentiated. Nevertheless, the system, as a whole, remains distinct. It allows itself to be irritated by different systems in its environment, but its resonance comes from within and is determined by its own history. The idea of form I am using here has an inside and an outside. It was Michelangelo, I think, who explained that the statue he wanted to carve was already there waiting within the block of marble in front of him; all he had to do was liberate it by chipping away the redundant stone. Form is two-sided. The inside is what is there; the outside is what had to be cut away for the inside to be revealed. Form is arrived at by selection, that is, by excluding what is not included and then concentrating on what is included as the inside of the form.

60  Approaches

The exclusions, for their part, are not just ‘potentialised’, as I suggested above, but also bracketed in time, temporalised, so they remain available for future use. What is the point of trying to think of the form of translation along these lines? Just as speaking cuts into silence, what is translated is profiled against what is left untranslated. But silence, too, can communicate. For instance, it may communicate an inability or unwillingness to translate. Moreover, just as the words a speaker selects push back other words that could have been spoken but were not, a translation offers its individual choice of words by obscuring other choices, as we saw before. In doing so, it activates one mode of representation at the expense of alternative modes. The temporal sequence in which these differential choices are made constructs a past as well as a future. The future is the horizon of possibilities that is conditioned by the present but that may still mine the past in unexpected ways. The past may be thought of as the storeroom in which selections and inclusions are archived, selectively, as part of a process of forgetting as well as remembering. We deselect outmoded ways of translating and let them sink into oblivion so as to retain only a conveniently foreshortened canon of successful past selections as a template for day-to-day use. But nothing prevents us from occasionally stirring up the sediment and reinstating former rejects, bringing them back from the margins. This is, to name just one instance, what Lawrence Venuti did in The Translator's Invisibility (1995) when he extracted from the historical archive a largely forgotten genealogy of non-fluent translations as a way of buying credit for his own programme of ‘resistant’ translation. The past is that selection of forms that the present holds available for future use. In all these ways, it seems to me, considering form as two-sided allows us to appreciate translation as involving ongoing selection and, therefore, exclusion as well as inclusion. The series that becomes visible in this way is the evolving social system of translation.

3.5 Second-Order Observation If selection has a performative and, therefore, a self-referential dimension, how self-reflexive can the system be? Anthony Pym (2004) and Brian Mossop (1998), among others, have claimed that a translating translator cannot say ‘I am translating’ because, at the moment of speaking or even thinking these words, the translator cannot be translating. It is a claim I do not want to tackle head-on, but I will nibble at its edges. I would argue that because self-reference shadows the performance of translation, the translator, as translating subject, is actually written into the enactment. Grasping translation as utterance means being alive to the fact that a particular, and no other, mode of representation is being selected. Perhaps the real problem lies elsewhere. We may be able to appreciate it better when we reflect that, while translating, translators can write their own subjectpositions as selectors into their performance as it proceeds, but they cannot, in their own performance, survey or assess the conditions of possibility of their performance. It takes another viewpoint to see that conditioning.

Translation, Irritation & Resonance [2007]  61

The situation I am describing has a parallel in hermeneutics. There, understanding is seen as dependent on the preknowledge and self-understanding that come from being part of a cultural context and tradition, including what HansGeorg Gadamer calls ‘the tyranny of hidden prejudices’ (1989, 270), the things one takes for granted as a product of one's age. The tyranny means that the understanding a person can achieve results from occupying a vantage point that he or she cannot fully appreciate. The idea is similar to what Paul de Man diagnosed as the blindness that both preconditions and enables insight and that only another observer can see. That observer, who operates from a different position, will distinguish between statement and meaning in the other's discourse – distinguish, that is, between what the speaker's words ostensibly say and what the observer construes as the unspoken preconceptions undergirding those words (Esposito 1996, 600; de Man 1971, 106). In the same vein, Wolfgang Iser, drawing on the system theories of the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, notes the ‘descriptive complementarity’ between operational and symbolic observation. The latter adopts a cognitive frame of reference that is different from that of the former. Symbolic observation can see what the operational observer cannot see (Iser 2000, 109–12). Symbolic observation, therefore, constructs a different rationale for the actions observed by operational observation. Most causal explanations, for example, are of this kind. Luhmann's term for this is second-order observation, which is the observation of observation. Observation is understood here in a broad sense as the use of distinctions to gain information. Second-order observation observes not so much what others observe but how they observe. It is typically what critics and researchers do when they read cultural artefacts, social practices or individual behaviour as symptomatic of something larger and hidden. Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud are the towering models of this kind of symptomatic reading. Translations observe the texts they represent. They engage in second-order observation when they comment on other translations not just in paratexts but also through the differential choices that have gone into their making. Secondorder observation may then be understood as the active ingredient in translationspecific intertextuality that enables translations to speak to and about each other. It sorts statement from meaning. What a translation says is one thing, its meaning is something else. It is what another observer construes as the first translation's blindness, and the other observer may well be a translator who, while translating, comments on another translator by making differential choices. Second-order observation serves as a reminder of the contingency and the limitation of every viewing position. We saw this kind of second-order observation at work in Laureen Nussbaum's Anne Frank translation, as it unpicked choices that may well have seemed selfevident to Mooyaart-Doubleday. For examples on a larger scale we might think of the tradition of orientalist translation or what we now call gender bias in much historical translating. The bias, in both cases, is the second-order observer's construction: the first-order observers were only doing what came naturally to them.

62  Approaches

The situation is epitomised in the story ‘Averroes' Search’ by Jorge Luis Borges (1981). The story concerns the medieval Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd (also known in the West as Averroes) who is engaged on a translation of Aristotle and, pondering Aristotle's Poetics and its section on dramatic forms, looks out of his window to see children play-acting in the yard. Nevertheless, lacking a concept of theatre in his own tradition, he remains incapable of grasping what (according to received wisdom in the Western tradition) Aristotle means by tragedy and ends up, incongruously, translating the term ‘tragedy’ as ‘panegyric’, meaning praise-poem. The incongruity is a construction of the second-order observer, who weighs Ibn Rushd’s choice of a particular Arabic equivalent against the choices made by others in other linguistic and intellectual contexts. Ibn Rushd himself did not know that he did not know; he interpreted Aristotle in the terms afforded by the world of which he was a part. Putting him right about tragedy, like Nussbaum lecturing Mooyaart-Doubleday, requires a viewpoint located in a different context, one that allows the conditioning of certain translation choices to be made visible. Second-order observation reminds the translation system that the criteria of what constitutes valid translation are subject to change. In this way, the system reflects on itself. And as the Nussbaum example showed, this reflection can take the form of differential choices made in individual translations. Let me round off this discussion of second-order observation by highlighting a recent and insightful demonstration of it in the field of the study of translation. Alexandra Lianeri’s reappraisal of Schleiermacher's 1813 lecture ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ (Lianeri 2002) is concerned with Schleiermacher's problematisation of translatability and his association of translation with culture. Among the essay’s key points is that Schleiermacher's notion of translation is underwritten by a politics of culture. As Lianeri explains, she seeks to demonstrate […] that Schleiermacher's theory of translation should not simply be grasped as a method of translation practice, but also as a means of creating a politically significant image of culture and society. Its historical importance, I suggest, lies not so much in the solutions it offered to the problem of untranslatability, as in the conception of translation as problem in the first place. (Lianeri 2002, 14) There are three aspects of this reading of Schleiermacher that are of interest in the context of second-order observation. 1. Schleiermacher begins by separating commercial hackwork from what he regards as the proper intellectual pursuit of translation. As Lianeri shows, he then associates translation with a concept of culture that he describes as being far removed from and unconstrained by the mundane realities of economic and sociopolitical life but that he, nonetheless, envisions as a socially

Translation, Irritation & Resonance [2007]  63

and politically unifying force. Schleiermacher, that is, appears to conceive of culture as both above politics and as politically unifying, but he remains unaware of the contradiction. However, while he cannot see his own aporia, a modern observer who occupies a different position and operates with different distinctions can see it. 2. Interestingly, Lianeri's investigation starts by remarking on the novelty of the Romantic preoccupation with translatability as a philosophical problem and by wondering about the Romantics' insistence on associating translation with culture. She begins, that is, by closely observing how the Romantics observe translation and what distinctions they use to do so. Second-order observation is interested less in what another observer observes than in how that observer observes, by means of what distinctions. And because it takes different distinctions to see how the Romantics distinguish, the exercise has a self-reflexive momentum. 3. To locate her own approach, Lianeri invokes, not Luhmann or Iser, but Fredric Jameson and his idea of metacommentary, which aims to question the presuppositions of a cultural practice while remaining alert to the grounds on which this questioning itself takes place. Like Luhmann's second-order observation, Jameson's metacommentary ( Jameson 1988) seeks to read cultural practices for the distinctions that enabled them in the first place. It seeks, in other words, to separate statement from meaning so as to figure out the position from which statements are made. Like second-order observation, metacommentary rebounds on the observer. It leads Lianeri to describe Schleiermacher's concern with translation as part of his idealisation of culture, an idealisation which is itself a response to an increasingly riven social reality. That provides us with a view of Schleiermacher's viewing position, his own blind spot. But it also leads Lianeri to wonder about the indiscriminate use of ‘culture’ in the humanities today, including today's translation studies. Although she does not pursue the matter in these terms, we may wonder: are we, as students of translation, perhaps as fond of ‘culture’ as the Romantics were because, like them, we are politically powerless? If so, what about the much vaunted ‘cultural turn’ in translation studies? Is it simply the mark, and the tacit admission, of political irrelevance? These may be awkward questions at a time when the so-called cultural turn in translation studies is widely seen as beneficial. Raising them here will, I hope, show that the apparatus of social systems theory allows us not only to look into translation as socially and historically embedded but also to query our own observations about it.

Note 1 All Luhmann's major works outline the ideas on which the following paragraphs are based. The most relevant titles are listed in the bibliography.

64 

Approaches

Bibliography Borges, Jorge Luis. 1981. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Edited by D.A. Yates and J.E. Irby. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Chesterman, Andrew. 1996. ‘On Similarity’. Target 8, 159–64. Clark, Herbert and Richard Gerrig. 1990. ‘Quotations as Demonstrations’. Language 66, 764–805. Esposito, Elena. 1996. ‘Observing Interpretation: A Sociological View of Hermeneutics’. Modern Language Notes 111, 593–619. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weilsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Sheed & Ward. Genette, Gérard. 1979. Introduction à l’architexte. Paris: Seuil. Gutt, Ernst-August. 1991. Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Oxford: Blackwell. Hill, Donna. 1977. Joseph Smith, the First Mormon. Garden City: Doubleday. Iser, Wolfgang. 2000. The Range of Interpretation. New York: Columbia University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1988. ‘Metacommentary’ [1971]. In The Ideology of Theory. Essays 1971– 1986. Volume 1: Situations of Theory, edited by Fredric Jameson, 3–16. London & New York: Routledge. Lianeri, Alexandra. 2002. ‘Translation and the Ideology of Culture: Reappraising Schleiermacher’s Theory of Translation’. Current Writing 14 (2), 2–18. Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Translated by John Bednarz. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1997. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas. 2000. Art as a Social System. Translated by Eva Knodt. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 2002. Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. Edited by W. Rasch. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 2004. Einführung in die Systemtheorie. Edited by Dirk Baecker. Heidelberg: Carl Auer. Man, Paul de. 1971. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Mossop, Brian. 1983. ‘The Translator as Rapporteur: A Concept for Training and SelfImprovement’. Meta 28, 244–78. Mossop, Brian. 1998. ‘What Is a Translating Translator Doing?’ Target 10, 231–66. Nussbaum, Laureen. 1994. ‘Anne Frank’. In Women Writing in Dutch, edited by Kristiaan Aercke, 513–75. London & New York: Garland. Persuitte, David. 1985. Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon. Jefferson & London: McFarland. Pym, Anthony. 2004. ‘Propositions on Cross-Cultural Communication and Translation’. Target 16, 1–28. Reuter, Paul. 1995. Introduction to the Law of Treaties. Translated by J. Mico and P. Haggermacher. London & New York: Kegan Paul International. Robinson, Douglas. 2001. Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason. Albany: State University of New York Press. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London & New York: Routledge.

4 WHAT IS TRANSLATION? [2013]

It’s simple, really. You want to know what translation is? Close this book, step out into the street and ask. Because translation is all around us, surely we know? Indeed, we do. To the question ‘What would you say translation is?’, interviewees are likely to respond with something like: translation is putting what was said in one language into another language; or, it is saying the same thing again in another language; or, it is conveying meaning from one language to another. All these definitions are perfectly good, and they reflect valuable truths. They are also incomplete and somewhat vague, and they do not always tell us what translation is not. In that sense, they fall short of the requirements of a formal definition, which should be both inclusive and exclusive. A definition should account for all the individual tokens under its purview but demarcate a borderline shutting out everything else. Should we then try to improve on the impromptu responses above and seek to arrive at a proper definition? Many serious and informed attempts along these lines have been made, and all, in one way or another, have fallen by the wayside. This is partly because of the wide range of phenomena that need to be covered and the difficulty of drawing a clear line separating translation from what is not or no longer translation. Another reason is that definitions are inevitably written from a certain point of view and reflect certain theoretical assumptions. The underlying framework will highlight some aspects or dimensions of translation and remain indifferent to others. The very multiplicity of attempted definitions and the diverse angles they bring to the issue suggest that translation is a complex thing and that a comprehensive and clear-cut view of it is hard to obtain. Sampling and criticising individual definitions is, therefore, unlikely to be a fruitful exercise.

4.1 Definitions Both in his Introducing Translation Studies (2001) and in the introduction to The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies (2009), Jeremy Munday acknowledges DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-6

66  Approaches

several meanings of the term ‘translation’. It can refer to a process, that is, to the act of producing a translation, as well as to a product, an actual text and, beyond these, to an unspecified number of related phenomena. Translation occurs primarily in written and spoken forms, the latter also being called interpreting. Its extent is indicated with reference to Roman Jakobson’s famous 1959 essay in which he explained that ‘the meaning of a linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative sign’, adding that we can ‘distinguish three ways of interpreting a verbal sign: it may be translated into signs of the same language, into another language, or another, nonverbal system of symbols’. Jakobson attached labels to these three kinds of translation: intralingual translation or rewording, interlingual translation or translation proper, and intersemiotic translation or transmutation (1959, 231–2). Jakobson was not offering a definition of translation; he was talking about different ways of gaining access to the meaning of a verbal sign. Nevertheless, his semiotically inspired categorisation of kinds of translation can serve as a reminder of the sheer difficulty, if not the futility, of attempting a straightforward definition. If interlingual translation is the prototype (‘translation proper’), how peripheral are the other two? How to define language if rewording, too, is translation? What language does transmutation speak? It could be argued that Jakobson was identifying metaphorical extensions of translation and that his use of the word ‘proper’ with reference to interlingual translation suggests as much. According to the traditional, Aristotelian view of metaphor, words have their ‘proper’ literal meaning in normal everyday use, while metaphor is an unnatural use of words, alien and rarefied. Metaphor, in this view, thrives on similarities and striking resemblances, but it can always be converted back into current, ordinary, familiar speech if we shear away its extravagance and bring it down to earth again (Aristotle 1965; Cheyfitz 1991, 35–7). With respect to Jakobson’s categories, however, this conversion would only compound the problem. Similarity and resemblance underpin most conceptualisations of translation, interlingual or not. The conversion from the metaphorical to the literal plane would itself be a form of translation but of the intralingual and, therefore, not the ‘proper’ kind. The English word ‘translation’ itself is heavily metaphorical, as shown by both its derivation (the Latin rhetorical term translatio means metaphor and translates a Greek word meaning ‘transfer’) and its relation to the ‘literal’ meaning of transporting the bones of Christian saints from one location to another. And this is only the beginning. ‘Every language act is a translation’, writes George Steiner in the very first sentence of the first article in one of the largest encyclopaedias of translation currently available (2004, 1). If intersemiotic translation is a legitimate, if possibly peripheral or questionable, form of translation, what about other usages of the term, beyond the domain of language and communication? The term translation is used with very specific meanings in genetics, physics and mathematics. It has a different meaning, again, in the thought of Michel Serres (1974), from whose writings it passed into the sociological framework known as actor–network theory (Latour 2005, 106ff ).

What is Translation? [2013]  67

The search for a comprehensive definition leads only to bewilderment, and we have barely moved beyond contemporary English. But we have made some headway. For one thing, pursuing the term ‘translation’ beyond the sphere of language and communication requires such broad knowledge and expertise that it would be foolish to try to incorporate all those meanings. For another, we may want to distinguish between, on the one hand, the word ‘translation’ and comparable words in other languages and, on the other, the concepts that these various terms denote. If we can gain a sense of the kind of things that are covered by a given term, we can explore similar concepts and phenomena elsewhere and consider the names attached to them in the relevant languages. In lexicological terms, this would be an onomasiological endeavour, one that starts from a concept and then asks what words are used to indicate it. The alternative is a semasiological study, which looks at the words in different languages and then asks what they mean (Wierzbicka 1992). Either way, as we will see, translation bedevils the search, as a cross-lingual understanding of translation requires us to translate and, thus, to perform the very operation we are trying to understand.

4.2 Preconditions If we restrict ourselves to translation as it operates in the sphere of culture and communication, we could do worse than to ask about salient commonalities and assumptions in various descriptions of it. The aim in doing so is not to compile a composite definition based on those features shared by existing definitions. That would mean assuming that translation is an objective reality existing independently of any observer and that we can identify the features that are the necessary and sufficient conditions for translation to be recognised as such (Halverson 1999a, 5). We can take a different route. The search for salient commonalities and assumptions is akin to the way the concept of literature, for instance, has been approached. Students of literature gave up trying to define literature long ago. Today, definitions of literature tend to be functional and contingent rather than formal or essentialist. Two introductory but influential textbooks will illustrate the point. Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory (1983) opens with a chapter entitled ‘Introduction: What is Literature?’. It argues that literature is best thought of as ‘a highly valued kind of writing’ and goes on to stress the social and ideological conditioning of values and value judgements. No actual definition emerges; perhaps there is no real need for one. Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997) has more to say on the subject. It adopts a two-pronged approach. The designation ‘literature’, Culler argues, serves as ‘an institutional label’ denoting ‘a speech act or textual event that elicits certain kinds of attention’. For historical reasons, attention of the literary kind has been focused on texts displaying certain features, notably – the list is not meant to be exhaustive – such things as the foregrounding of language, the interdependence of different levels of linguistic organisation, the separation from the practical context of

68  Approaches

utterance and the perception of texts as both aesthetic objects and intertextual or self-reflexive constructs (1997, 27–35). The label ‘literature’ and the features assigned to it tend to correlate so that the recognition of formal traits will trigger the institutionally appropriate kind of attention and vice versa. Note that the correlation, and the salient features, are a matter of historical contingency. They reflect the way literature has come to be understood within a particular cultural tradition. That has consequences – but let us ignore this aspect for the time being. If we follow the example of literature, we might seek to understand ‘translation’ as little more than a label around which various assumptions and practices have accrued over time in certain traditions. We may then be able to get a sense of the concept of translation by considering those assumptions together with their characteristics and preconditions. Many students of translation would probably agree that translation is concerned with communication and that it tends to be called for in certain crosscultural communication situations in which it can act as a problem-solving device. Why should cross-cultural communication present more, or more acute, problems than intracultural communication? Because it is riskier, in several respects. Anthony Pym has described cross-cultural communication as characterised ‘by a relatively high degree of effort required to reduce complexity, by relatively high transaction costs, by relatively low trust, and by relatively narrow or restrictive success conditions’ (2004a, 5). By the effort required to reduce complexity, Pym means the effort needed to make sense of communicative acts or texts. Not only is there a considerable risk of things going wrong in cross-cultural communication, but also the costs are high because it takes significantly more effort to achieve understanding than is the case in intracultural communication. If, in extreme cases, which are, nonetheless, very common, we do not understand the cross-cultural other’s language at all but still want to communicate or to gain information, we have to invest either in learning the other’s language or in recruiting a translator. Translation is one means of overcoming an intelligibility barrier of this kind (Hermans and Koller 2004). How translation goes about overcoming intelligibility barriers in practice is one thing. A prior question concerns the very possibility of translation. Ubaldo Stecconi has developed a logico-semiotic angle on this question. Approaching it through the semiotics of C.S. Peirce, Stecconi (2004, 478–82) suggests that what enables translation, before it ever takes place in actual fact, is the combination of three things: similarity, difference and mediation – in that order. The kind of sign-action in which translation engages presupposes and requires the possibility of things being perceived as similar or being made to seem similar, whatever precise form this similarity will eventually take. No translation would be possible if some sort of similarity could not be invoked. However, similarity needs difference as its logical condition and backdrop; it is also difference which creates the practical need for translation. Mediation, finally, is the overcoming of difference

What is Translation? [2013]  69

by means of similarity but without abolishing difference. Mediation achieves matchings across difference. The kind of mediation in which translation engages typically generates a discourse in which two voices intermingle, one speaking on behalf of the other and representing it. Representation demands similarity of one kind or another, while the co-presence of interlocking utterances serves as a reminder that difference remains. An approach along these lines can provide a sense of what preconditions translation, or what translation entails, while sidestepping a formal definition. There are other such approaches, closer to the world of actual occurrences and events than Stecconi’s Peircean evocation of potentialities. As early as 1953, John McFarlane, the harbinger of the descriptive line in translation studies, urged researchers to accept that ‘translation is as translation does’ and that the frame of mind informing the study of translation should be ‘diagnostic rather than hortatory’ (1953, 92–3). Gideon Toury put this injunction into practice when he took the suspension of a definition of translation as the basis for empirical studies. For Toury, a translation was ‘any target-language utterance which is presented or regarded as such within the target culture, on whatever grounds’ (1985, 20). The claim remains vulnerable – merely presenting a text as a translation may not be enough for others to recognise or accept it as a translation – but it launched case studies and research programmes. Although descriptivism in translation studies has a theoretical arm, its primary thrust is empirical. Its diagnostic outlook draws it to actual translations and their immediate environment. This is both its strength and its limitation. Whereas Stecconi’s three characters (similarity, difference, mediation) sketch the semiotic conditions of existence of translation without saying anything about how translations will actually be done or turn out, descriptivism works the other way round and tangles with the cultural and historical conditioning of translation as it occurs in real time and space. Going beyond this has proved problematic, as is shown by the three postulates that Toury (1995, 33–5) claimed were able to account for a language-independent notion of translation. In brief, the postulates say, first, that for every translation there is a corresponding original or base text in another language; second, that some kind of transfer must have taken place from original to translation; and third, that the resulting relationship between the two texts may be termed one of equivalence, whatever the meaning assigned to this term in particular cases. Especially the second and the third postulate present problems. The transfer postulate begs the question of what exactly is transferred in translation and how we should envisage the transfer process. It requires the separation of signifier and signified that Jacques Derrida, among others, has derided (2002, 18–22). It also projects what Michael Reddy (1993) called the conduit metaphor of communication, according to which meanings are devised in the mind, encrypted in language and dispatched to a receiver who unpicks the code and is then able to inspect and store its content intact. While this communication model underpins some very influential accounts of translation, from Eugene Nida to Peter

70 

Approaches

Newmark, it is by no means generally accepted. Relevance theory, social systems theory, skopos theory and Anthony Pym favour an inferential model, according to which communication is a matter of stimulus and inference: signals are emitted and receivers make sense of them as best they can, using their own mental make-up. Nothing is transferred, and there can be no question of an invariant signified being bundled from one location or one mind to another on the back of a signifier. The point of this criticism is that it seems hard to base a postulate about a language-independent notion of translation on a contested theory of language – a theory, moreover, that has grown out of a particular Western philosophical and linguistic tradition. Toury’s third postulate concerns the relationship between a translation and its original and is vulnerable because of the infelicitous reference to equivalence. The starting point is perfectly sound: translation generates an intertextual link, the precise shape of which remains to be determined from case to case. Subsequently jumping the gun by speaking of equivalence seems unfortunate. The term equivalence itself, a relative newcomer in Western discourses on translation, suggests an equality of value and, hence, an equitability and interchangeability with the original that translation, as understood in these Western discourses, has not enjoyed – just as the languages and cultures between which translation moves have not usually been equal. In day-to-day parlance, translations and their base texts may be treated as equivalent, but this is a fragile, pragmatic sort of equivalence that can be challenged at any time (‘I’ve been reading Plato in English, but what did he actually write?’). In those institutional and legal contexts in which a translation can, in fact, be declared fully equivalent with its source, as happens in multilingual treaties, for instance, or in international organisations such as the European Union and the United Nations, a translation that has been formally ‘authenticated’ in this way is no longer a translation but becomes a version on a par with its source – and, therefore, as equally original and authentic. In all other contexts, equivalence remains beyond the reach of translation (Hermans 2007, 1–25). True, Stecconi, at one point, claimed that equivalence was ‘the unique intertextual relation that only translations, among all conceivable text types, are expected to show’, but no sooner had the ink dried on this statement than he corrected himself and replaced ‘equivalence’ with ‘similarity’ (2004, 479) – for which, surely, no such claim of uniqueness can be made. Because the attempt to draw an outline of the concept of translation by postulating necessary features and relations runs into problems, we should perhaps remind ourselves of the way literary theorists approached the concept of literature as a combination of a mere label with a set of historically contingent characteristics that had grown up around it. In translation studies, the line of thinking that most closely resembles this model, and that has been explored by functionalists and descriptivists alike, is norm theory. Less essentialist than the approach through postulates, norm theory has the added advantage that it can be married to prototype theory, as we will see.

What is Translation? [2013]  71

4.3 Norm Theory The concept of norms entered the study of translation as part of the endeavour to account in social and historical terms for the choices translators made (Toury 1995, 53–69; Hermans 1999, 72–90; Schäffner 1999). The starting point was the underdetermination of translation. An original text can give rise to different translations, as alternative choices present themselves to the translator at every turn. Differences from one version to another are, therefore, to be expected, but why do translators’ choices tend to form patterns rather than being random and idiosyncratic? Historically, certain fashions, styles or schools of translation can easily be discerned, suggesting a degree of coordination among translators, and between translators and their audiences, without this conformity being due to totalitarian regimes imposing their exclusive will by force. If individual translators, working in conditions in which they can exercise their own judgement, can be observed as recurrently preferring certain options while rejecting alternatives that are also available, we can ask what prompts these preferences. Norm theory provides an answer. The theory links individual behaviour with collective expectations. The reasoning is, roughly, that a translator’s preferences – provided they are neither purely wilful nor the result of necessity or compulsion – reflect shared expectations binding translators and their clients together. The expectations concern the nature of the translated product, and they can be either probabilistic or normative. Probabilistic expectations, or conventions, are merely predictive. If a reader’s expectation is disappointed because the translator has made an unexpected choice, the only consequence is that the expectation will be adjusted in preparation for the next occurrence. Normative expectations are more assertive than this. They not only predict the likelihood of certain choices being made, they also hold that these choices should be made because they are the correct or proper choices. If the expectation is disappointed, it is kept intact regardless, counterfactually, and action may be taken to bring the misbehaving translation into line and persuade the translator to mend his or her ways. If the expectation is met, praise or reward might follow by way of encouragement. Conventions and norms constitute the outward aspect of correctness notions. In the case of translation, these correctness notions are ideas that are alive in a community about what translation is and what will be recognised as a proper, correct or acceptable translation. Normative expectations, in particular, function as instruments that keep certain local concepts of translation in place. They regulate the practice of translation and, in so doing, continually update and reinforce the distinction between what is and what is not translation and between what is an exemplary and a merely tolerable translation. Because normative expectations uphold abstract correctness notions by promoting what is regarded as good practice and reprimanding deviant behaviour, they are relatively stable and possess a certain durability despite the vagaries of individual translators’ decision-making and the critical responses to them. To the extent, then, that the interaction

72  Approaches

between expectations about translation and the production of actual translations is articulated in the form of comments (praise, blame, polemics), commissions (demands, requests) and other communicative acts (making payments, awarding prizes, taking punitive measures), the outlines of translation as understood in a particular community come into view. The key strength of norm theory lies in its simultaneous appeal to social and psychological spheres, the collective and the individual. The study of translation norms and everything they entail, including conflicts, challenges and changes over time, yields insight into concepts of translation held by certain communities at certain times. A study like this does not set out to determine what translation is in any absolute or immanent sense, but what translation means to certain groups located in time and space. The focus of attention also shifts from the ontological to the interpretive, as what is at stake is not something inherent in translation that needs to be recovered but the way in which evidence is marshalled to build a picture of translation as a given community conceives of it. Many of the concepts of translation now current in translation studies are, in fact, distilled from the contemporary Western understanding of the term or from the way the term is commonly used in modern English, and they are valid in this restricted sense. Translation as representation fits this mould, as does the expectation of a close semantic correlation between translations and their source texts. The correlation may be expressed in the strong form of pragmatic equivalence or in the more cautious form of ‘relevant similarity’ (Chesterman 1996) or Relevance theory’s ‘interpretative resemblance’ (Gutt 2000). It may be possible to go a little further in this direction. Anthony Pym (2004b, 70ff ), for instance, has argued that translation, in the sense just indicated, involves at least two specific maxims of representation: quantity and first-person displacement. The maxim of quantity says that translations will be of roughly the same length as their base texts. First-person displacement means that the ‘I’ that speaks in a translation is held to be the ‘I’ of the speaker in the anterior text and not that of the translator, despite the reader’s or listener’s awareness that the translator speaks for the author and that, therefore, two voices must be in play. Both the quantity and the first-person displacement maxim are maxims in the Gricean sense. Challenging them triggers implicatures suggesting the text in question is not a translation as routinely understood but something else, such as a gist translation or a paraphrase or some other variant. The large majority of translations observe both maxims. Quantity is relative; there is no telling exactly when a translation begins to transgress against the maxim of quantity or how much transgression the maxim can bear. With first-person displacement, the switch is turned either on or off without there being an in-between state, but even here, vagueness persists. It is perfectly possible to imagine an amateur interpreter translating consistently in the third person using indirect speech and, thus, without first-person displacement (‘She says she was going out, she was crossing the street when she saw this man’, etc.), just as an entire novel may be written in indirect speech – indeed, Antonio Tabucchi’s Declares Pereira (1994) is written in this vein. The implicature

What is Translation? [2013]  73

may be that we are then dealing with paraphrase or with non-professional interpreting, but both would still be understood as forms of translation, albeit not mainstream translation. Maxims, that is, have more in common with contingent and contestable norms than with necessary conditions of the kind demanded by formal definitions or postulates.

4.4 Prototype Theory If this suggests that translation may be a concept covering a range of ideas and practices, some of which are regarded as more central and others as more peripheral, we are entering the field of prototype theory. The theory helps the definition of translation by accommodating diversity and blurred edges. It reflects the awareness that, on one hand, translation is not a uniform concept and lacks a clear boundary separating it from everything that is not translation, and that, on the other, there is, nonetheless, a measure of agreement concerning what a term like ‘translation’ means in present-day English. The basic assumption in prototype theory is that, by and large, people who use a word like ‘translation’ share an idealised cognitive model of the concept, against which, in day-to-day usage, each person’s individual idea of translation can be tested. The prototypical concept of ‘translation’ can be thought of as embodied in a number of works that are unhesitatingly accepted as translations, with, ranged alongside them, various notions and expectations that are, again without hesitation, associated with translation. Beyond this core lies a large grey area in which there may be less certainty and even a good deal of disagreement about what still pertains to translation or falls outside it. Graded membership (some translations are more prototypical than others) and fuzzy boundaries (disputes about borderline cases will occur) are the hallmark of prototype theory (Snell-Hornby 1995; Halverson 1998 and 1999a. Prototype theory has intuitive appeal. Jakobson’s threefold division, as we saw, posited interlingual translation as its central term and arranged the other two types around it as somehow less obvious and more peripheral. Historically, a classification like John Dryden’s proceeds in similar fashion. Dryden’s middle term is paraphrase, ‘or translation with latitude’, which he approves of as the gold standard; to the left and right, we find metaphrase, which he admits only grudgingly (it is ‘a foolish task’ and like ‘dancing on ropes with fettered legs’), and imitation, which is barely recognisable as translation (‘if now [the translator] has not lost that name’) (Robinson 2002, 172–3). The hierarchies implicit in many binary divisions of translation (formal versus dynamic, semantic versus communicative, overt versus covert, domesticating versus foreignising) tell a similar story, as one term is invariably privileged over the other and, thus, held to be more ‘proper’ or prototypical. The metaphorical load carried by the word ‘translation’ and its cognates in some other languages also fits a prototype approach quite well in that the metaphors highlight pervasive conceptual schemas (Halverson 1999b). However

74  Approaches

debatable some of the implications of these metaphors may be, they underpin common perceptions. The etymology of the current English term ‘translation’, as we saw, suggests displacement and relocation and, hence, a whole string of entailments: the conduit metaphor of language, semantic stability and invariance, the separation of signifier and signified, the primacy of authorial intention – in short, everything deconstruction has summed up as the ‘metaphysics of presence’. Very different ideas and images might have gathered around the concept of translation if the word for translation had been different, but, as Kathleen Davis (2001, 18) has pointed out, it is no accident that the philosophical tradition of the West spawned precisely the notion of translation as transport encapsulated in the historical derivation of the English word and its cognates. There is also a second widely distributed set of metaphors, which caters to translation as representation and figures it as imitation, assimilation, replication, reproduction, recasting and transformation (Martín de León 2010; Chesterman 1997). The amount of variation and overlap that these sets permit makes them eminently compatible with a prototype concept of translation. The relevance of the metaphorical loads encrusted on the word ‘translation’ may be twofold. They are, in the now well-worn phrase, ‘metaphors we live by’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). However, they go beyond reflecting and, in turn, fostering a particular idea of translation. Because they are so ingrained, they seem not just obvious but natural and true. That is, they seem to capture the nature and essence of translation, not just here and now, in this idiom and its history, but across time and space. Do they?

4.5 Cluster Concepts There are at least two problems with this line of thought and, in fact, with everything that has been said so far, including the casual use of the personal pronoun ‘we’. One problem is minor, the other major. The minor problem is called Walter Benjamin. All the perspectives on translation reviewed in the previous pages assume that translation is a matter of communication, but Benjamin’s essay of 1923, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1996, 45–57), rejects that perspective out of hand. It builds a theory of language and translation on radically different foundations. Of course, we can dismiss Benjamin’s musings as ‘mystical vagaries’, as André Lefevere (1977, 94) did at a time when only he and George Steiner had read Benjamin, but this nonchalance sits uneasily with the fact that the essay, however out of this world it may seem, grew out of the Western tradition nonetheless and is now one of the most celebrated and most quoted texts in modern translation studies. Perhaps we need to be prepared for more diversity than even a prototype approach can encompass. The major problem, however, has to do with the multiplicity of languages and cultures in the world, something to which Western translation studies have only recently woken up. If translation, as understood in modern English, can

What is Translation? [2013]  75

be regarded as a prototype concept, other languages and cultures, including those in the past, must be assumed to possess similarly wide-ranging and diffuse concepts of translation (as indeed Chesterman and Arrojo 2000 suggest). This raises several questions. Is it likely that these different concepts can be gathered up in a superordinate prototype? Can we use a term like ‘translation’ as a touchstone to gauge alternative concepts? How do we map individual concepts onto those of other languages in a global, inclusive and cross-cultural discipline of translation studies? Questions like these have some urgency at the present time. Forms of translation are proliferating because of new technologies and new modes of production and distribution, throwing up new vocabularies in the process. In the academic world, the geopolitics of international translation studies favour the dissemination of Anglophone terminology and Eurocentric concepts of translation at the risk of either marginalising alternative practices or crudely assimilating them to ‘translation’ as understood in English and related languages. Several recent discussions of concepts of translation beyond the Western world (Chesterman 2006; Prasad 2010; Trivedi 2006; Tymoczko 2007, 68–77; Tymoczko 2010) have trailed through a range of languages and come up with terms that seem comparable to ‘translation’ but evoke very different images and associations and appeal to diverse domains of meaning and experience. To date, there is only a very limited number of studies in English offering in-depth analyses of non-Western concepts of translation in their historical complexity (Cheung 2005 and 2007 for Chinese; Paker 2006 for Ottoman Turkish; Wakabayashi 2009 for Japanese). Even though explorations of this kind have barely begun in earnest and remain tentative, they have already queried many of the assumptions underpinning translation studies as currently configured in the West. Maria Tymoczko (2006, 2010) has listed a number of these assumptions and presuppositions. Here is a quick sampling: translation mediates between linguistic and cultural groups, typically between languages associated with nation states and monolingual individuals and cultures; it involves decoding and recoding, mostly applied to texts fixed in written form; the principal text types have been defined and categorised; translation can be taught and learnt to a professional standard; key issues in translation are authority, fidelity, equivalence and the primacy of the original. Many of these current assumptions in translation studies dovetail with the prototypical concepts of translation prevalent in the Western tradition. This is not surprising, but the consequence is that the discipline, with its historical and ethnocentric baggage, may be poorly equipped to deal with ideas and practices outside the Western orbit. If the study of translation is to transcend these traditional confines and become cross-cultural on a global scale, it may need to reinvent itself. For that to happen, at least two things would seem to be required initially: a flexible, non-reductive approach to diverse concepts of translation and critical self-reflexivity in engaging with these concepts. As for the former, the most promising line of enquiry may well be that sketched by Tymoczko (2007, 54–106) in terms of understanding translation

76 

Approaches

as a cluster concept. The idea of cluster concepts goes back to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), who suggested that, in order to understand concepts and categories, we may want to look at partial similarities across a wide range of exemplars. Instead of trying to define ‘language’ or ‘translation’, we seek to establish their meaning by tracing what Wittgenstein calls ‘family resemblances’, open-ended series of similarities, analogies, overlaps and relationships that can be observed in varied practices in different contexts. In contrast with prototype theory, the search does not aim to identify a pool of traits which most, or the most representative, members of the category have in common. Instead, the process depends on recognising resemblances linking phenomena wherever they occur, even if they go under different names. Whereas prototype theory assumes a hierarchy of centre and periphery, with a privileged hard core of representative cases and more peripheral zones with fuzzy edges, a cluster concept approach remains decentred and rhizome-like, moving from case to case and, in the process, accommodating divergent and even incommensurable instances and practices. It engages in close, localised observation and puts the onus on the observer to demonstrate linkages with related phenomena elsewhere. In this sense, it seems well suited to exploring translation concepts in a global context and across historical periods. Whatever the language and culture being investigated, and in whatever language the investigation is conducted, the report needs to be phrased in a metalanguage. The metalanguage may be a disciplinary jargon, but it will still be couched in a natural tongue such as English. Here lies the irony alluded to earlier in this chapter. The cross-cultural study of translation cannot escape having to translate, but the meanings, concepts and practices being traced across diverse cultures and time frames will not be readily translatable, for they tell specific, local stories that have often remained untold in other tongues. It is, therefore, worth asking what kind of translation, in and on whose terms, the cross-cultural study of translation wants to perform. Whether or not we assume English as the vehicle, the reporting idiom will come with values, histories and taxonomies already inscribed in it, and this has hermeneutic, ethical and ideological implications. How to represent otherness in familiar terms – an old translation problem – is rendered acute by the politics of languages and intellectual disciplines. One solution may be found in the idea of ‘thick translation’. The phrase was coined by Kwame Anthony Appiah (2000), who grafted it on the ethnographer Clifford Geertz’s notion of ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973), which, in turn, was borrowed from the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1971). Thick description, which Geertz deployed in order to counter the reductiveness of a structuralist anthropology that subsumed otherness under its own preconceived categories, lavishes detailed, personalised attention on complex lifeworlds in an effort to find both similarities and differences within and across cultures. It is a self-conscious mode of representation, and, indeed, some of Geertz’s celebrated ‘thick descriptions’ helped trigger the crisis of representation in anthropology known as the ‘Writing Culture’ debate of the 1970s and 1980s (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Applied

What is Translation? [2013]  77

to cross-cultural translation studies, and more particularly to the cross-cultural exploration of concepts of translation, the practice of thick translation could, likewise, revel in the detail of individual cases and histories. In so doing, it could bring about a double dislocation: of the foreign terms and concepts, which are probed by means of a methodology and vocabulary inevitably alien to them, and of the investigator’s own terminology, which must be wrenched out of its familiar shape to engage with both similarity and alterity (Hermans 2007, 150). Such an academic practice can only be self-reflexive. It must, as Tymoczko (2007) calls it, ‘enlarge translation’ for the sake of an inclusive discipline, but it must also query its own conceptual apparatus and lineage and, therefore, its own positioning and agenda.

Bibliography Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2000. ‘Thick Translation’ [1993]. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 2nd ed., 389–401. London: Routledge. Aristotle. 1965. ‘On the Art of Poetry’. In Classical Literary Criticism, edited and translated by T.S. Dorsch, 29–76. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Benjamin, Walter. 1996. ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ [1923]. In Walter Benjamin. Ein Lesebuch, edited by Michael Opitz, 45–57. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Chesterman, Andrew. 1996. ‘On Similarity’. Target 8, 159–64. Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Chesterman, Andrew. 2004. ‘Translation as an Object of Research’. In Übersetzung. Translation. Traduction. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung. An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction, vol. 1, edited by Harald Kittel, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert, and Fritz Paul, 93–100. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Chesterman, Andrew. 2006. ‘Interpreting the Meaning of Translation’. Supplement to SKY Journal of Linguistics 19 (supplement: A Man of Measure. Festschrift in Honour of Fred Karlsson), 3–11. www​.ling​.helsinki​.fi​/sky​/julkaisut​/SKY2006​_1​/1FK60​.1​.1​ .CHESTERMAN​.pdf. Chesterman, Andrew and Rosemary Arrojo. 2000. ‘Shared Ground in Translation Studies’. Target 21, 1–29. Cheung, Martha. 2005. ‘“To Translate” Means “to Exchange”? A New Interpretation of the Earliest Chinese Attempts to Define Translation (“Fanyi”)‘. Target 17, 27–48. Cheung, Martha, ed. 2007. An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation. Volume I: From Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project. Manchester & Kinderhook: St Jerome. Cheyfitz, Eric. 1991. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from ‘The Tempest’ to ‘Tarzan’. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clifford, James and George Marcus, ed. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Culler, Jonathan. 1997. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, Kathleen. 2001. Deconstruction and Translation. Manchester: St Jerome. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. London & New York: Continuum.

78  Approaches

Eagleton, Terry. 1983. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Gutt, Ernst-August. 2000. Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. 2nd ed. Manchester: St Jerome. Halverson, Sandra. 1998. Concepts and Categories in Translation Studies. Bergen: Department of English, University of Bergen. Halverson, Sandra. 1999a. ‘Conceptual Work and the “Translation” Concept‘. Target 11, 1–31. Halverson, Sandra. 1999b. ‘Image Schemas, Metaphoric Processes and the “Translate” Concept‘. Metaphor and Symbol 14, 199–219. Halverson, Sandra. 2003. ‘The Cognitive Basis of Translation Universals’. Target 15, 197–241. Hermans, Theo. 1999. Translation in Systems: Descriptive and Systemic Approaches Explained. Manchester: St Jerome. Hermans, Theo. 2007. The Conference of the Tongues. Manchester: St Jerome. Hermans, Theo and Werner Koller. 2004. ‘The Relation between Translations and their Sources, and the Ontological Status of Translations’. In Übersetzung. Translation. Traduction. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung. An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction, vol. 1, edited by Harald Kittel, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert and Fritz Paul, 23–30. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Holmes, James S. 1988. ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ [1972]. In Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies, edited by Raymond van den Broeck, 67–80. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Jakobson, Roman. 1959. ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’. In On Translation, edited by Reuben Brower, 232–9. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lefevere, André, ed. 1977. Translating Literature: The German Tradition. Assen: Van Gorcum. McFarlane, John. 1953. ‘Modes of Translation’. Durham University Journal 45 (3), 77–93. Martín de León, Celia. 2010. ‘Metaphorical Models of Translation: Transfer vs Imitation and Action’. In Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors, edited by James St André, 75–108. Manchester: St Jerome. Munday, Jeremy. 2001. Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications. London & New York: Routledge. Munday, Jeremy, ed. 2009. The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies. London & New York: Routledge. Paker, Saliha. 2002. ‘Translation as Terceme and Nazire: Culture-Bound Concepts and their Implications for a Conceptual Framework for Research on Ottoman Translation History’. In Crosscultural Transgressions: Research Models in Translation Studies II: Historical and Ideological Issues, edited by Theo Hermans, 120–43. Manchester: St Jerome. Paker, Saliha. 2006. ‘Ottoman Conceptions of Translation and its Practice: The 1897 Classics Debate as a Focus for Examining Change’. In Translating Others, edited by Theo Hermans, 325–48. Manchester: St Jerome.

What is Translation? [2013]  79

Prasad, G.J.V. 2010. ‘Caste in and Recasting Language’. In Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond, edited by Judy Wakabayashi and Rita Kothari, 17–28. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pym, Anthony. 1995. ‘European Translation Studies, “une science qui dérange” and why Equivalence Needn’t be a Dirty Word‘. TTR 8, 153–76. Pym, Anthony. 2004a. ‘Propositions on Cross-Cultural Communication and Translation’. Target 16, 1–28. Pym, Anthony. 2004b. The Moving Text: Localization, Translation and Distribution. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Reddy, Michael. 1993. ‘The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language’ [1979]. In Metaphor and Thought, edited by Andrew Ortony, 164–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Douglas, ed. 2002. Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche. 2nd ed. Manchester: St Jerome. Ryle, Gilbert. 1971a. ‘Thinking and Reflecting’ [1966–7]. In Collected Papers. Volume II: Collected Essays 1929–1968, edited by Gilbert Ryle, 465–79. London: Hutchinson. Ryle, Gilbert. 1972b. ‘The Thinking of Thoughts’ [1968]. In Collected Papers. Volume II: Collected Essays 1929–1968, edited by Gilbert Ryle, 480–96. London: Hutchinson. Schäffner, Christina, ed. 1999. Translation and Norms. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Schäffner, Christina. 2004. ‘Systematische Übersetzungsdefinitionen’. In Übersetzung. Translation. Traduction. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung. An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction, vol. 1, edited by Harald Kittel, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert and Fritz Paul, 101–17. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Serres, Michel. 1974. La traduction (Hermès III). Paris: Minuit. Snell-Hornby, Mary. 1995. Translation Studies. An Integrated Approach. Revised ed. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Stecconi, Ubaldo. 2004. ‘Interpretive Semiotics and Translation Theory: The Semiotic Conditions to Translation’. Semiotica 150, 471–89. Steiner, George. 1998. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steiner,George. 2004. ‘Translation as Conditio Humana’. In Übersetzung. Translation. Traduction. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung. An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction, vol. 1, edited by Harald Kittel, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert and Fritz Paul, 1–11. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Susam-Sarajeva, Şebnem. 2002. ‘A “Multilingual” and “International” Translation Studies?’ In Crosscultural Transgressions: Research Models in Translation Studies II: Historical and Ideological Issues, edited by Theo Hermans, 193–207. Manchester: St Jerome. Toury, Gideon. 1985. ‘A Rationale for Descriptive Translation Studies’. In The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, edited by Theo Hermans, 16– 41. London & Sydney: Croom Helm. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Trivedi, Harish. 2006. ‘In Our Own Time, On Our Own Terms. “Translation” in India‘. In Translating Others, edited by Theo Hermans, 102–19. Manchester: St Jerome. Tymoczko, Maria. 2006. ‘Reconceptualizing Western Translation Theory: Integrating Non-Western Thought about Translation’. In Translating Others, edited by Theo Hermans, 13–32. Manchester: St Jerome.

80  Approaches

Tymoczko, Maria. 2007. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Manchester: St Jerome. Tymoczko, Maria. 2010. ‘Western Metaphorical Discourses Implicit in Translation Studies’. In Thinking Through Translation with Metaphors, edited by James St André, 109–43. Manchester: St Jerome. Wakabayashi, Judy. 2009. ‘An Etymological Exploration of “Translation” in Japan’. In Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond, edited by Judy Wakabayashi and Rita Kothari, 175–94. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1992. Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-specific Configurations. New York: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.

5 UNTRANSLATABILITY, ENTANGLEMENT AND UNDERSTANDING [2019]

It is tempting to begin with the now familiar deconstructive paradoxes: we can’t translate, we must translate. Everything is translatable, nothing is translatable. Nothing is translatable because the unique performance of a word occupying its singular position in the individual economy of an evolving idiom is not repeatable, let alone transposable into the different words of another idiom – even if we could determine exactly what an idiom was and who was speaking whose tongue. At the same time, everything is translatable, provided we have at our disposal a limitless supply of words and an infinity of time, even though such a rendering would exceed the boundaries of what we conventionally, in today’s English, call translation. I will resist the deconstructive temptation, partly because I want to keep the rhetoric down, but also because I think it is fair to say that, in his critique of translation, Jacques Derrida took aim at a relatively easy target (1979, 1985, 2001). More often than not, his criticism was directed at a rather routine concept, the idea of translation as an exact replica or the transport of an invariant. In that sense, it is concerned primarily with the definition of translation, and his reflections, original, elegant and bold as they are, propose an understanding that is more ample than the traditional concept. This is perfectly valid and has proved immensely stimulating, but it does not really help us much further with the notions of translatability and untranslatability. I will, therefore, take a different route. Here are two glaring examples of untranslatability, two translators facing something they cannot translate. The first case is historical, the other fictional. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam translated the New Testament from Greek into Latin in 1516 as a correction – he called it a castigatio – of Jerome’s Vulgate. There are bilingual editions of this translation, in a large folio format, with the translator’s notes at the bottom of the page. In these editions, the first page of DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-7

82 

Approaches

the Gospel according to John is a marvel to behold. It shows a single wispy line of Greek at the top, with a corresponding Latin line facing it. The rest of the page is footnote, two columns in small print, rising up to almost the top of the page and spilling over onto the next page. Admittedly, the Greek contains the notoriously problematic word logos (‘In the beginning was the Word’). Jerome had rendered logos with verbum (‘word’). Erasmus preferred sermo (‘discourse’) and spent his outrageously long footnote explaining why sermo was better than verbum but still did not quite live up to logos. The footnote later blossomed into an fully-grown treatise (Erasmus 1522), and still, he felt, sermo fell short of logos. The recent Dictionary of Untranslatables (Cassin 2014), also a large book, has a tenpage entry on logos, offering 23 English translations of the term along with three in Latin (ratio, oratio and verbum); sermo makes a fleeting appearance in the course of the article, but Erasmus is not even mentioned. My other example is the twelfth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes), as fictionalised by Jorge Luis Borges in his story ‘Averroes’ Search’ (1947; Borges 1985). Emily Apter has called it ‘a parable of the Untranslatable’ (2013, 254), with a capital ‘U’, no less. The story shows Averroes struggling to translate the Poetics of Aristotle into Arabic. As he looks out of the widow of his study pondering Aristotle’s observations on drama, the translator sees children play-acting in the courtyard below. He recalls accounts by travellers who told of foreign countries where crowds gathered to watch individuals standing on a platform, each pretending to be someone other than who they actually were. But Averroes’s culture does not have plays, it does not possess a concept of theatre, and when he comes to Aristotle’s reflections on tragedy, he is stumped by the Greek word for this literary form and eventually renders ‘tragedy’ as ‘praise-poem’. Erasmus and Averroes were translators facing something untranslatable. But the fact is, they both translated. Erasmus was perfectly aware that sermo was not quite the same as logos, but he put it down, nevertheless, and stuck with his choice through several revisions and editions of his New Testament (in 1519, 1522, 1527 and 1535, a year before his death). Averroes may have struggled even more, but he came up with the best interpretation available to him. If we call his rendering a mistranslation, we deny validity to the worldview he brought to bear on his undertaking. Both, then, translated, and in so doing, in the act of translating as best they could, they overcame and negated untranslatability – which has continued to haunt their renderings all the same. The haunting is there in Erasmus’s swirling footnotes and in his subsequent treatise on translating logos. It is there in the unease that we feel at Averroes’s apparent clumsiness. Untranslatability does not prevent translation from taking place, at most it slows it down, and the reflection about the renderings in question – Erasmus’s footnotes, our misgivings about Averroes’s choice of words – highlights their tentative nature, their provisionality, the sense that different circumstances might have led to alternative choices – the sense, in short, that while the act of translating subdues the untranslatable, it does not quite eliminate it.

Untranslatability [2019]  83

We know the issues at stake. They can be summed up in a pair of terms like incongruence versus integrity. Incongruence points to the structural differences between languages, the asymmetry or non-isomorphism both of different languages and of the cultural spheres in which languages are embedded. Friedrich Schleiermacher (I will return to him) spoke in this connection of the irrationality of language. This is not a matter of absolute incommensurability. Indeed, radical incommensurability would probably defy description and be impossible to register in any language. As the philosopher Marco Buzzoni put it: ‘If we wanted to prove that something could not be translated into our language, we would need to determine in our language what it was that our language could not express, and that would mean finding the correct translation’ (1993, 23: ‘Wenn man zu beweisen versuchte, daβ etwas in unsere Sprache nicht übersetzt werden könnte, müβte man das bestimmen, was unsere Sprache nicht ausdrücken könnte, und das würde darauf hinauslaufen, die richtige Übersetzung zu finden’). The other term, integrity, takes us back to the paradoxes with which I began. It demands that translation preserve intact the singularity of an utterance and the fullness of its meaning, thereby positing translation as exact reproduction and inviting a discourse of violation and loss whenever translation produces something other than a replica. But the demand for integrity, for the transference of a signified kept unaltered from one signifier to another, is predicated on a certain view of language and communication, the so-called conduit view. This view, as Derrida has pointed out, casts language as a vehicle carrying some metaphysical semantic load which is itself beyond language. It loses much of its force when we adopt instead an inference model of communication. This model posits senders who emit signals and receivers who make sense of the signals in terms of their own lifeworlds and mental states. This is the model adopted, for instance, in Relevance theory, with its characteristic mixture of cognitive, pragmatic and contextual factors (Sperber and Wilson 1986). I therefore agree with Marco Buzzoni (as well as Roman Jakobson, Jerrold Katz and others) that the idea of absolute untranslatability is probably not tenable. But that does not mean that translatability is unproblematic. Perhaps the phrasing used, not by a philosopher or linguist, but by an anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, in the 1977 essay ‘Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination’ can help us to imagine a more realistic scenario. He says: The truth of the doctrine of cultural (or historical – it is the same thing) relativism is that we can never apprehend another people’s or another period’s imagination neatly, as though it were our own. The falsity of it is that we can therefore never genuinely apprehend it at all. We can apprehend it well enough, at least as well as we apprehend anything else not properly ours. (Geertz 1977, 799)

84  Approaches

I’ll leave aside the question whether we truly apprehend what we imagine to be properly ours and focus instead on the qualifiers Geertz built into his statement: we apprehend alterity, he says, not ‘neatly’, but ‘well enough’. The qualifiers enable him to reconcile what he calls ‘the massive fact of cultural and historical particularity’ with ‘the equally massive fact of cross-cultural and cross-historical accessibility’ (Geertz 1977, 803). He adds that we achieve this apprehension of otherness ‘not by looking behind the interfering glosses that connect us to it, but through them’ (1977, 799). The fundamental possibility of at least a degree of cross-cultural comprehension mitigates its formidable difficulty. The difficulty remains, though. Cross-cultural comprehension will not be neat. Otherness will not be mastered. It will be negotiated by means of ‘interfering glosses’, the meanings already present in the minds of those engaged in cross-cultural interpretation. Yet it seems to me that if we want to understand how, in real-life situations, apprehension and comprehension come about and translation is initiated, we need a further term, one that allows us to appreciate not just the historical conditioning of translation in contact zones but also the probing, the configuring and the eventual consolidation of cross-lingual correspondences that come with such contacts. A candidate for such a term might be ‘entanglement’, the key word in Mary Louise Pratt’s essay ‘The Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration’ (2002). Pratt’s essay is concerned with reports of the gruesome execution of an indigenous rebel by the Spanish colonial authorities in Cuzco, Peru, in 1781. The reports were written by Spanish officials. They served to justify and enforce colonial rule, and, as part of this rule, to exterminate indigenous cultural expressions. Pratt’s term ‘entanglement’ indicates the ways in which the reports, despite their apparent intention, nevertheless engage in some detail with indigenous cultural practices and concepts. Because the reports recommend the wholesale destruction of these practices and concepts, the meanings the native people attach to them are addressed at length. Hence, while the colonisers’ accounts interpret the native customs from a particular angle and for a particular purpose, they transcribe, translate and explicate the indigenous terms in the process. And the translations not only reflect the colonisers’ understanding and agenda, but they are also a product of the moment: in the aftermath of a failed uprising, and to forestall further trouble in future, they were needed there and then. If we take ‘entanglement’ to mean the conditioning of cultural mediators by the intellectual and social formations of which they are a part, including the glosses they bring with them, we can better understand how translation, despite the difficulties, will happen, not once but repeatedly, because the practical, immediate need for it overrides other considerations. To put it differently, the spectre of untranslatability may well loom large before translation and linger after it, but acts of translation sweep it aside because particular conditions may require translation urgently and the available glosses and inevitable entanglements will

Untranslatability [2019]  85

enable decision-making about cross-lingual and cross-cultural equivalents that fit the circumstances. It may be useful to have a few examples to make these points more concrete. I want to mention briefly three cases of individuals coming face to face with utterly alien languages at a time – the sixteenth century – when Europe was barely able to imagine just how different the world’s languages and cultures could be. Yet these individuals found ways and shortcuts around and through these differences, and they produced transpositions that suited their immediate purposes. They learnt the languages in question from people with no experience in language teaching and without the help of handbooks, dictionaries or grammars. They are not household names: Juan de Betanzos, Thomas Harriot and Michele Ruggieri. Here are the three snapshots. About Juan de Betanzos (1510?–1576?) we don’t know much at all. He was born in Spain, possibly of mixed lineage (Fossa 2008). He appears to have had limited formal education (his written work shows no trace of Latin) and was active in Peru from around 1540 onward. He probably learnt Quechua in the 1540s, one of the earliest European speakers of the language (Fossa 1997, 5), but his command of it remained superficial (Fossa 2005, 924). Even so, he worked as an interpreter and married an Inca noblewoman, who became the main source for his Suma y narración de los Incas (Narrative of the Incas), which he wrote in the 1550s. In the preface to this book, he claimed also to have compiled vocabularies and a catechism, but these are now lost (De Betanzos 1880). The Narrative is based on oral history told to him in Quechua, which he then wrote down in Spanish. At a time when virtually no bilingual speakers were around, he had to interpret native words and concepts from the Inca and sometimes the pre-Inca past. Gathering information was no easy task. As he explained in the preface to the Narrative, his native informants often expressed different views on the same subject, and the Spaniards, too, held diverse opinions regarding indigenous beliefs (Fossa 200, 911) – in this last remark we glimpse the glosses that mark the different actors’ entanglements. As a result, De Betanzos’s translations from Quechua, as we encounter them in his Narrative, suggest a great deal of guesswork and, more often than not, a reductive assimilation of Quechua concepts into the translator’s own rather mediocre Spanish. Among the many examples that Lydia Fossa discusses in her detailed study is the word chuco, which Betanzos simply renders as ‘bonnet’ but which, according to Fossa, possessed all manner of symbolic meanings bearing on social standing and ethnic affiliation (Fossa 2005, 916–18). Another term, capacocha, associated with the sacrifice of children, is rendered by De Betanzos as ‘solemn sacrifice’, whereas modern archaeologists give it as ‘royal obligation’ (Andrushko et al. 2011, 3), suggesting a whole network of power relations. Does this mean De Betanzos’s translations are inadequate and fail to do justice to Inca society, history and culture? That would be one way of looking at them. Another is to recognise in his renderings the glosses he brought with him and which enabled him to devise translations that met the requirements of the moment.

86 

Approaches

Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) is much better known as an Early Modern scientist than as a linguist. He was a friend of Walter Raleigh and of the translator George Chapman, who, in the preface to his Iliad, mentioned Harriot by name and called his knowledge ‘incomparable and bottomless’ (Rhodes 2013, 371). In 1584, Harriot became the first European known to be consciously learning a North American indigenous language, picking up Algonquin from two Indians, Manteo and Wanchese, whom Raleigh had brought back to England earlier that year. In 1585, he took part in the short-lived English settlement on Roanoke Island (now in North Carolina), where he acted as an interpreter. After his return to England, he published a Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588). Harriot invented a phonetic alphabet to represent the sounds of the Algonquin language, the first time anyone had done such a thing; it consisted of a ‘universal alphabet’ of 36 symbols allegedly able to record the sounds of any language – an astonishing feat for its time (Salmon 1996). His Report, like De Betanzos’s Narrative, contains a good number of Algonquin names for local plants and other things: ‘the barke of the tree called by the inhabitants Tangomóckonomindge’ (1588, 11); ‘There is a kind of berry or acorne, of which there are five sorts […] the one is called Sagatémener, the second Osamener, the third Pummuckóner. […] Another sort is called Sapúmmener […]. The fifth sort is called Mangúmmenauk’ (1588, 19). On several occasions, Harriot admits his imperfect grasp of the language. He says he spoke to the indigenous people about Christianity, ‘with manie particularities of Miracles and chiefe poyntes of religion, as I was able then to utter, and thought fitte for the time’ (1588, 39). We can wonder what local words he used to convey these points of an utterly alien set of beliefs. He tells us that the natives used tobacco, ‘which they call Uppówoc’, not only to smoke but also for special ceremonies, ‘uttering therewithal and chattering strange words & noises’ (1588, 16) – although, in this case, it is unclear how much he was meant to understand. The linguistic barrier he faced must have been huge, but he had to do the best he could. Just how extensive his grasp of the Algonquin language was we shall never know, as the particular variant that Harriot learnt no longer exists. Together with Michele Ruggieri (1543–1607) I should probably have mentioned the much better known Matteo Ricci (1552–1610). Both were Italian Jesuits, and the first Europeans to learn Chinese. Ruggieri had reached Macau in 1579 and gained access to mainland China four years later. He was sent back to Rome in 1588, never to return to China. Ricci eventually made it to Beijing and became the most celebrated in a long line of Jesuit missionaries to China. Ruggieri and Ricci started to learn Chinese around 1580, realising they had to learn Mandarin, not the Cantonese they heard around them in Macau and Guangdong province. Ruggieri, like Harriot, began by devising a transcription system for Chinese. He was astonished to find that Chinese, as he put it, had ‘no alphabet, there are as many letters as there are words’ (Brockey 2007, 246). Ricci, too, expressed bewilderment that Chinese possessed ‘no articles, no cases, no numbers, no genders, no tenses, no modes’ (Brockey 2007, 247). If it took Ricci

Untranslatability [2019]  87

some time to discover the importance of tones in Chinese, this is because he was tone-deaf (Brockey 2007, 249). Despite the difficulties they must have faced, Ruggieri printed a catechism in Chinese as early as 1584, and, together with Ricci, compiled a Portuguese-toChinese glossary of some 6,000 words. The glossary goes one way only, from Portuguese to Chinese, because the missionaries worked in Portuguese and were after the Chinese terms that corresponded to the Western concepts they were keen to import into China. This meant that Christian concepts were given Chinese equivalents that, being Chinese, carried no Christian connotations at all (sin and sinner, for instance, were rendered as crime and criminal; Liu 2011, 366–70). In subsequent decades, the missionaries would use Confucian terms to represent Christian concepts, but in these early days, informed choices of this kind were not available to them. In fact, their first attempt at cultural translation also misfired: associating Buddhism with their idea of what constituted a religion, and wanting to be seen as religious men, they dressed as Buddhist monks; it was only when they realised that the monks were held in very low esteem that they reinvented themselves as literati, members of the well-educated and powerful Chinese bureaucracy. What renders these cases compelling as well as colourful is the complex set of entanglements, agendas, preconceptions, needs and desires that made up their outlook – and that enabled the men in question to translate. De Betanzos was clearly part of a colonial apparatus and, in writing his Narrative, may well have been after personal gain for himself and his wife. Harriot was in North America at a time when the European settlers were still very much dependent on the resources, knowledge and goodwill of the native inhabitants but also keen to gather information about what Harriot called the ‘merchantable commodities’ of the land, with a view to a future colonial project. Ruggieri and Ricci were motivated by their desire to make converts. In a poem written in Chinese, Ruggieri explained that, despite his still imperfect grasp of the language, he could not wait to get on with the task that had brought him to China, the task of preaching the Christian faith (Chan 1993; Liu 2011, 375). These historical cases are of interest because it seems to me that, for all the indeterminacy of reference and the underdetermination of translation which philosophers and linguists have highlighted in theoretical discussions of translatability and untranslatability, the concrete, real-life entanglements of people such as De Betanzos, Harriot and Ruggieri cut through the theoretical problems placed in the way of translation. Entanglement and the glosses through which it operates may not undo untranslatability, but they sideline it because the circumstances that demand translation will not wait. There is another aspect to this. With hindsight, we can see how tentative, partial, crude and perhaps reductive the cross-lingual equivalences are that the men I mentioned establish in their wordlists and glossaries. The same hindsight lets us gauge the extent to which these lists labour to manufacture rather than record cross-lingual equivalence. It is only when these matchings and correspondences

88 

Approaches

inform further translations and are eventually refined and consolidated into dictionaries that we begin to take them for granted and to assume that they log preexisting, natural synonymies. In other words, we run the risk of assuming that cross-lingual equivalences make translation possible instead of recognising them as resulting from acts of translation. It is the practice of translation that produces an equivalence of sorts, not the existence of equivalence that enables translation. In The Clash of Empires, Lydia Liu already stressed the ‘imagined adequatio of meanings’ (2004, 110) in encounters of this type. The conceptual pairings generated under these conditions are no more than ‘makeshift inventions’ (ibid.) that become fixed through repeated use or are eventually replaced by the preferences of later generations. If these early cross-cultural contacts show us translation struggling to create correspondences and equivalences, they also make us appreciate that these matchings, even when they are coded into dictionaries, remain uncertain, provisional and vulnerable to challenge. Because, in my view, full equivalence lies beyond translation anyhow, this provisionality, the impossibility of reaching a definitive version, pertains to all translating (Hermans 2007, 1–51). This is another way of saying that untranslatability, the perennial uncertainty that stalks our renderings, may be neutralised through the pressure of circumstances, but it continues to shadow translation. To get a sense of what this shadowing means, we need to change tack again. We need to turn to Friedrich Schleiermacher. As far as I am aware, throughout the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods in Europe, untranslatability, as an issue that threatens the very endeavour of translation, is never addressed directly or in any detail. The first time untranslatability is conceptualised as a fundamental issue is in the intellectual atmosphere of what we now call Romantic Europe, when, especially in Germany, new ideas about language are being floated. At the heart of this new philosophy of language, as articulated by Herder, Von Humboldt and others, is the insight that words, rather than being mere ciphers for ideas, actually shape ideas and are shaped by them and that words and ideas cluster in ways that are unique to individual languages. Because language and thought are inseparable (thinking, Schleiermacher will say, is silent speaking) and languages are non-isomorphic, communities bound together by a common tongue each inhabit their own conceptual universe or worldview. Earlier periods in European history had been aware of the non-isomorphism of languages, but they had treated it as a practical inconvenience, a surface phenomenon. Now it became a fundamental issue, not just a question of personal identity and social belonging but something that called into question the very possibility of translation – even as translation remained as necessary as before. In the preface to his rendering of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus into German, Von Humboldt observed that, of course, the work in question was untranslatable (Humboldt 1963, 80). Schleiermacher, whose international fame rests not on his 1813 lecture on translation (to which I will return shortly) but on his theological writings and his epoch-making interpretation of Plato, flatly denied

Untranslatability [2019]  89

the existence of synonymy across languages: not even a formula like A=A or the words for ‘and’, he says, not even the first noun and the first verb (by which he meant the noun ‘god’ and the verb ’to be’), are the same in two languages (Schleiermacher 1862, 173; 2002, 89; 2002a, vol. 1, 98). This dramatic incongruity he calls the ‘irrationality’ of language, and it led him to wonder, in the 1813 lecture, if translation was not a foolish undertaking. Given the irrationality of language and the foolishness of even attempting to translate, it may be of interest to see how Schleiermacher then tackles the issue of translation – and where he leaves off, at a point where it seems to me he could and perhaps should have continued. Let me start my reading of the 1813 lecture by saying that, in my opinion, it is not about either bringing the foreign author to the reader or taking the reader to the foreign author. This is a point I have argued elsewhere and will not repeat here (Hermans 2015 and 2019). But I will repeat what I think the lecture is about, namely hermeneutics. For Schleiermacher, hermeneutics, as the art of understanding both within and across languages, starts from non-understanding. Nonunderstanding is the baseline, the human condition by default. Understanding has to be willed, and it requires effort, diligence, application and study. This is because, for every utterance to be understood, the hermeneuticist has to reckon with the dual relation between language and the individual speaker. On the one hand, the language circumscribes what can be thought and said in it; on the other, creative minds can mould the language to make it say new things. This duality has a methodological counterpart in the two steps that hermeneutic labour follows. It begins with studying an utterance as a product of language and then moves to the necessarily more speculative assessment of what a creative individual has done with and to the language. The ultimate aim of hermeneutics is to reach complete understanding and, even more than that, to understand authors better than they understood themselves – by which Schleiermacher means, bringing to consciousness that which remained unconscious to an author. This aim will never be reached. Hermeneutics, Schleiermacher says, is a neverending task; it does not bring interpretive closure. How does all this bear on translation? The 1813 lecture is neither more nor less than the application of the principles of hermeneutics to translation. Crosslingual hermeneutics is merely an extension of intralingual hermeneutics, hence nothing special. At the same time, it is very special because of the irrationality of language. What makes translation exceptionally challenging is the fact that translators, having achieved the best understanding of the foreign work that they are capable of, have at their disposal only the resources of their own language to articulate this understanding, an understanding that does not undo the alienness of the alien work but remains aware that the foreign discourse is at home in its language in a way that the translator, necessarily entangled in his or her own language and culture, can never fully grasp, let alone convey in his or her own, incongruent tongue. The word ‘untranslatable’ does not feature in Schleiermacher’s lecture, but it lies only just beyond the horizon. The words that

90  Approaches

gesture most insistently in its direction are the adjective eigenthümlich and the related noun Eigenthümlichkeit (as he spells them), which occur 18 times between them, although you wouldn’t know it from the English translations, which speak variously of singular(ity), individual(ity), particular(ity) and peculiar(ity) – terms pointing to the uniqueness of each language and the culture of which it is a constituent part. What I called earlier the co-existence of incongruity and integrity appears in Schleiermacher as the irrationality of language and Eigentümlichkeit. The hermeneutic effort and, therefore, all translating, aim at comprehending the singularity of an individual work in its natural habitat, and then, in a move specific to translation, articulating that always partial understanding by means of the necessarily different conceptual resources of another language. There are several things which Schleiermacher did not develop in his 1813 lecture, some of which he could have and one which, perhaps, he should have developed. For instance, in the lecture, he presents languages as clearly delineated, discrete, national entities, although in other work, just a few years earlier, he had shown himself perfectly aware of the hybrid nature of the language of the New Testament. In his earliest notes on hermeneutics, in 1805, he distinguished between the process of understanding, which he described as a mental process, and the verbal record of the outcome of that process, a new text which, in turn, would be an object of hermeneutic attention. He later dropped this distinction and it does not appear in the 1813 lecture, although it seems eminently relevant to translation. What I called the entanglement of translators in their own language and worldview, the exegete’s positionality thematised by modern hermeneutics as the necessary prejudice that accompanies all interpretation, is another point left undeveloped in Schleiermacher’s lecture, even though it was staring him in the face: he is adamant that, however diligently we study other cultures, including those of the past, we remain outsiders, late-comers, onlookers, unable to gain more than fragmentary knowledge of products that have grown organically in their own environment. The closely related point he might and, perhaps, should have developed concerns the never-ending task of hermeneutics. If the hermeneutic task is unending, and if translation is the cross-lingual application of hermeneutics, then translation, too, must remain forever provisional. And if there can always be different translations of the same original – as Schleiermacher knew perfectly well, having fashioned his own Plato translation very differently from his predecessors – then surely they reflect different interpretations, even though Schleiermacher seems to cling to the belief that the hermeneuticist can reach the best possible or the fullest possible interpretation, which, nevertheless, is never quite final because, if it were, the hermeneutic task would have reached an end point. There appears to be an aporia here, which Schleiermacher does not confront either because the whole lecture on translation didn’t matter that much to him (he cobbled it together in just a couple of days and brushed it aside as trivial) or because he didn’t want to. That aporia, I think, is the spectre of untranslatability. The lecture brings hermeneutics to bear on translation, it highlights

Untranslatability [2019]  91

cross-cultural comprehension as being supremely difficult, it is eloquent about the enormity of the challenge facing translators who have only their own language to explicate to their readers, innocent of the foreign tongue, the particular understanding of the foreign work that they themselves have reached – and then it stops. Even though it recognises that cross-cultural understanding, more so than intralingual understanding, remains tentative and incomplete, it says nothing about the provisionality of the translation embodying that understanding, its openness to renewed attempts, to correction and repetition. It shies away from confronting untranslatability. The closest it comes is the idea of translation as a foolish undertaking. Yet provisionality may characterise the way we have come to view untranslatability today. Some years ago, I spoke of the repeatability of translation as ‘another way of filling out the notion of the untranslatable, understood here as the impossibility of exhausting the store of possible alternative renderings and of reaching a definitive translation’ (Hermans 2007, 121). Well before that, and no doubt vastly more influentially, Barbara Cassin was writing of the untranslatable as the ‘interminability’ of translation (Apter 2014, vii), defining the untranslatable as ‘what one keeps on (not) translating’ (Cassin 2014, xvii). This latter idea underpins the vast edifice first published in French in 2006 and now available in English as the Dictionary of Untranslatables (Cassin 2014). The Dictionary’s sheer size, its philosophical sophistication and its linguistic range will ensure that the untranslatable remains a topic for some time to come. Personally, while I can only marvel at the amount of knowledge it contains, I think it is a pity that it is still so focused on what it persistently calls mistranslations and non-translations. In the definition of the untranslatable as ‘what one keeps on (not) translating’, it is the negativity of the ‘not’ that I object to. As we saw, even in extreme circumstances, translations happen. They may be tentative and provisional but that does not make them into mis- or non-translations, as all translating can always be done again differently. The very idea of mistranslations and non-translations presupposes that of correct or full or perfect translation, the integral transmission of an invariant meaning. We know this to be a chimera. True, the Dictionary of Untranslatables dilutes this idea by treating untranslatability as that which inhibits translation, the bumps in the road which give translators occasion to pause and reflect. But if every hesitation is an index of untranslatability, there is little except untranslatability, which inflates the concept to an unhelpful degree. Lawrence Venuti (2016) has recently – and rightly, to my mind – savaged the Dictionary of Untranslatables for its fixation on mis- and non-translation at the expense of the idea that every translation embodies an interpretation of its original. If the modern critic rejects that interpretation as defective, this rejection can itself be scrutinised as another interpretation. The approach I have taken here is different in that it has stressed the historical conditions demanding translation, slicing through whatever knot of untranslatability the actors on the ground may have perceived. From this point of view, I deplore the Dictionary‘s failure to

92 

Approaches

engage with the entanglements of individual translators and the circumstances in which, or the glosses through which, they made their decisions. Sadly, just as the Dictionary ignores Erasmus on logos, it also fails to give credit to Schleiermacher, who was the first to glimpse the untranslatable in theoretical terms, even though in the event, wisely or not, he stepped back from it.

Bibliography Andrushko, Valerie et al. 2011. ‘Investigating a Child Sacrifice Event from the Inca Heartland’. Journal of Archaeological Science 38, 323–33. Apter, Emily. 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso. Apter, Emily. 2014. ‘Preface’. Translated by Steven Rendall et al. In Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. English translation edited by Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood, vii–xv. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Betanzos, Juan de. 1880. Suma y narración de los Incas. Madrid: Manuel Hernández. Accessed February 11, 2018. http://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/25705​/25705​-h​/25705​ -h​.htm. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1985. ‘Averroes’s Search’ [1947]. Translated by James Irby. In Labyrinths, edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Yates and James Irby, 180–8. London: Penguin. Brockey, Liam. 2007. Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724. Cambridge & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Buzzoni, Marco. 1993. ‘Sprachphilosophische und methodologische Probleme der Übersetzung aus personalistischer Sicht’. In Übersetzen, verstehen, Brücken bauen. Geisteswissenschaftliches und literarisches Übersetzen im internationalen Kulturaustausch, vol. 1, edited by Armin Paul Frank, K.-J. Maaβ, Fritz Paul and Horst Turk, 22–57. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Cassin, Barbara, ed. 2014. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Translated by Steven Rendall et al. English translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Chan, Albert. 1993. ‘Michele Ruggieri SJ (1543–1607) and his Chinese Poems’. Monumenta Serica 41, 129–76. Derrida, Jacques. 1979. ‘Living On. Borderlines’. Translated by James Hulbert. In Deconstruction and Criticism, edited by Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller, 62–142. New York: Continuum. Derrida, Jacques. 1985. ‘Des tours de Babel’. Translated by Joseph Graham. In Difference in Translation, edited by Joseph Graham, 165–207. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. ‘What is a “Relevant” Translation?’. Translated by Lawrence Venuti. Critical Inquiry 27, 174–200. Erasmus, Desiderius. 1522. ‘Apologia de In principio erat sermo’ [1520]. In Apologiae Erasmi Roterodami omnes, adversus eos, qui illum locis aliquot […] sunt calumniati, edited by Desiderius Erasmus, 133–48. Basel: Joannes Froben. Fossa, Lydia. 1997. ‘La Suma y narraçion de Betanzos: Cuando la letra hispana representa la voz quechua’. Presentation to the Latin American Studies Association, Guadalajara (Mexico). Accessed February 11, 2018. http://biblioteca​.clacso​.edu​.ar​/ar​/ libros​/ lasa97​/fossa​.pdf.

Untranslatability [2019]  93

Fossa, Lydia. 2005. ‘Juan de Betanzos, the Man who Boasted Being a Translator’. Meta 50, 906–33. Fossa, Lydia. 2008. ‘El difuso perfil de Juan de Betanzos come traductor de lenguas indígenas’. Trans 12, 51–65. Geertz, Clifford. 1977. ‘Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination’. The Georgia Review 31, 788–810. Harriot, Tomas. 1588. A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Viginia (1588). Edited by Paul Royster. DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Accessed February 11, 2018. http://digitalcommons​.unl​.edu​/cgi​/viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=1020​ &context​=etas. Hermans, Theo. 2007. The Conference of the Tongues. Manchester: St Jerome. Hermans, Theo. 2015. ‘Schleiermacher and Plato, Hermeneutics and Translation’. In Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Question of Translation, edited by Larisa Cercel & Adriana Şerban, 77–106. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. Hermans, Theo. 2019. ‘Schleiermacher’. In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, edited by Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson, 17–33. London & New York: Routledge. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1963. ‘Einleitung zu Agamemnon’. In Das Problem des Übersetzens, edited by Hans Joachim Störig, 71–96. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Liu, Lydia. 2004. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press. Liu, Yu. 2011. ‘The True Pioneer of the Jesuit China Mission: Michele Ruggieri’. History of Religions 50, 362–83. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2002. ‘The Traffic in Meaning: Translation, Contagion, Infiltration’. Profession, 25–36. Rhodes, Neil, ed. 2013. ‘George Chapman, The Iliads of Homer (1611)’. In English Renaissance Translation Theory, edited by Neil Rhodes with Gordon Kendal and Louise Wilson, 365–73. London: Modern Humanities Research Association. Salmon, Vivian. 1996. ‘Thomas Harriot (1560–1621) and the English Origins of Algonkian Linguistics’. In Language and Society in Early Modern England: Selected Essays 1981–1994, edited by Vivian Salmon, 143–72. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1862. Psychologie. Aus Schleiermacher’s handschriftlichem Nachlasse und nachgeschriebenen Vorlesungen. Edited by L. George. Berlin: G. Reimer. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2002. Akademievorträge. Edited by Martin Rössler. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2002a. Vorlesungen über die Dialektik. 2 vols. Edited by Andreas Arndt. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Venuti, Lawrence. 2016. ‘Hijacking Translation: How Comp Lit Continues to Suppress Translated Texts’. Boundary2 43, 179–204.

PART 2

Concepts





6 TRANSLATIONAL NORMS AND CORRECT TRANSLATIONS [1991]

6.1 As my starting point, I would like to take James Holmes’s now classic essay ‘The Name and Nature of Translation Studies’ (1972). The essay represents one of the first attempts to survey the entire field of translation studies, to distinguish its main subdivisions and to define the objects of study and the methodological tools of each one. The new discipline was taking shape, Holmes noted, because there had developed ‘a new sense of a shared interest in a common set of problems, approaches, and objectives on the part of a new grouping of researchers’ (1988, 67). This sense of a shared interest in issues of translation, together with the establishment of channels of communication to exchange views and information about the field, constituted what Holmes called, with a term taken from the sciences, a ‘disciplinary utopia’ (1988, 67–8). Holmes’s division of translation studies into different branches and subbranches followed from his observation that the discipline was an empirical one, constituting ‘a field of pure research’ (1988, 71). The division itself, however, showed an intriguing hesitation. Holmes’s major distinction corresponded to the one normally made in empirical or ‘pure’ disciplines, between a descriptive and a theoretical branch, that is, between the study of actual phenomena – existing translations and their contexts – and the formulation of more general regularities and principles (1988, 71ff ). After reviewing these two branches of ‘pure’ translation studies, Holmes added a third branch, applied translation studies, which, as the term suggests, focus on practical applications, from translator training to translation criticism. It was only at the end of the essay that he ranged the theoretical, descriptive and applied branches together, leaving it unclear whether we should think of translation studies as consisting primarily of two branches (pure

DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-9

98  Concepts

or empirical, on the one hand, and applied, on the other) or three (descriptive, theoretical and applied). Holmes’s hesitation, it seems to me, is still with us, as is the uneasy relation between applied and ‘pure’ translation studies, or at least the descriptive component of the ‘pure’ or ‘empirical’ branch. The unease can be traced back to the fact that, as Holmes already noted, many translation researchers enter the field from other disciplines, such as linguistics, literary studies or media studies. Their goals and priorities tend to relate to their professional working situation. This may explain the broad division between, on the one hand, those doing empirical research on translation, often at universities (but by no means exclusively on literary translation, as Mary Snell-Hornby would have us believe; 1988, 22–6), and, on the other, those engaged in teaching practical skills at institutes for translator training. Both descriptive and applied translation studies draw on the theoretical branch, on translation theory. But they do not make the same use of it. This is particularly evident, I think, in the case of the concept I now wish to concentrate on, that of norms. It is a concept that has come to play a major part in translation studies of all kinds. The trouble is that it keeps cropping up at different levels. The rest of my chapter, then, focuses on the role of norms in translation, seen as a communicative practice and, therefore, as a form of social behaviour. At the end, I shall return to the place of the concept of norms, as an operational concept, in translation studies.

6.2 The approach to the concept of norms is perhaps best made through another, more traditional key concept, that of equivalence. Traditionally, translation as such was defined in terms of equivalence of one kind or another; translation meant the replacement, or substitution, of an utterance in one language by a formally, semantically or pragmatically equivalent utterance in another language (Van den Broeck 1978; Koller 1978, 79–80; Wilss 1982, 134ff ). The problems arose as soon as the concept was considered more closely. A strict definition of equivalence, as in mathematics, would imply complete reversibility and interchangeability of the source and target utterances, which would, therefore, have to be regarded as synonymous. This was plainly unworkable; synonymy between two terms in any natural language is already rare, let alone across languages – that is, between asymmetrical linguistic and cultural systems. A weaker definition was envisaged: equivalence as implying similarity, analogy, correspondence or – to use Holmes’s term – ‘matching’, of a certain kind, to a certain degree and on certain levels only, as illustrated by Werner Koller (1978, 81–3), who distinguished five types of equivalence (denotative, connotative, text-normative, pragmatic and formal). This made equivalence into a fluid and relative concept. But the basic question remained: if total or maximum equivalence was unattainable, what was the minimum equivalence required for a given text to be regarded

Translational Norms & Correct Translations  99

as a translation of another text? To my knowledge, no serious attempt has ever been made to formulate the minimum equivalence conditions that would allow us to distinguish unequivocally between translation and non-translation. This left the issue hovering in mid-air. A way out of the blind alley was proposed in Gideon Toury’s collection of essays In Search of a Theory of Translation (1980). Toury turned the matter on its head. He started from the position that a translation is that utterance or text which is regarded as a translation by a given cultural community – that is, an utterance or text which is accepted and functions as a translation in a sociocultural system (Toury 1980, 43). This allowed him to dissolve the concept of equivalence understood as a prerequisite for translation: if Text A is a translation of Text B (because it is regarded as such within a given sociocultural configuration), then we assume that the relation between them is one of equivalence (1980, 39, 65). In other words, equivalence is merely the name given to the ‘translational relation’ that exists between two texts, one of which is a translation of the other. Or, more fully, equivalence is the term denoting the ‘translational relation’ that we postulate as existing between two texts because we have observed that one of them is regarded and, therefore, functions as a translation of the other in a given sociocultural system or a section thereof. The main consequence of this reversal of perspectives is that the questions are no longer of the type: do we have a sufficient degree of equivalence (of what kind? at what level?) to call this text a translation? What is the ideal or maximum equivalence that can or should be achieved? On the contrary, an equivalence relation – or, if you prefer, with a wholly neutral term: a ‘translational relation’ – is taken for granted, and the interesting questions now become: what type of translational relation do we have, and why do we appear to have a relation of this type rather than another? The answers to these questions, Toury contended, have to do with norms, for they determine what type of translational relation, at what textual level, there will be between a source and a target text. In this way, the concept of norms replaces that of equivalence as the researcher’s centre of attention. As Toury put it in his essay on ‘The Nature and Role of Norms in Literary Translation’ [1976]: the study of norms is a vital step in establishing the actual realization of the equivalence postulate – in one translation, in the work of a certain translator or school of translators, in a certain period, or in any other selection serving as a corpus. (1980, 56) From the translator’s point of view, every act of translating, every instance of translation, is governed by certain norms. From the researcher’s point of view, norms are ‘a category for descriptive analysis of translation phenomena’ (Toury 1980, 57; his emphasis).

100  Concepts

Toury went on to describe different kinds of norms (1980, 53ff.). He distinguished between positive and negative norms and, more importantly, between ‘preliminary’ and ‘operational’ norms, the latter, in turn, divided into ‘matricial’ and ‘textual’ norms, and he added a special category called ‘initial’ norms, which determine whether a translation is to be primarily source-oriented or target-oriented. He further categorised norms according to the strength of their normative force into mandatory norms, tendencies and ‘other tolerated behaviour’. The shift from translational equivalence to translational norms was a decisive move. Still, Toury’s own discussion of norms leaves much to be said and done. If norms are as central to translating and, hence, to translation studies as we now think they are, then we have to make further efforts to try and understand their nature and role – why they are there and what their function is. The theoretical reflections I want to offer here regarding the concept of translational norms have a double perspective: that of system theory, on the one hand, and of the contextualisation of translational behaviour as social behaviour, on the other. It is an approach that is consistent with the functional-descriptive tendency that has been around in translation studies for the last 15 or so years. It differs from Toury’s approach in that it is less closely tied to the actual process of translation. It may also be worth stressing that, although much of what I have to say about systems, conventions and models is couched in general terms, it is meant, at every turn, to apply to translation, and to all types of translation, literary as well as nonliterary, and without restriction in time or space.

6.3 The claim that the set of translated texts circulating in a given sociocultural configuration can be regarded as a communicative system, which lends itself to description in systemic terms, is not new. To rehearse some of the basic ideas, a system, broadly speaking, is a structured whole, characterised internally by ‘organised complexity’ and separated from its environment by a boundary. When we are dealing with so-called open systems, the definition of the system boundary is largely a matter of heuristic convenience and strategy (Kast and Rosenzweig 1981, 50). The relation between a system and its environment is asymmetrical, if only because a system, however complex, is always less complex than its unbounded environment (Schwanitz 1990, 24, 27). Social and cultural systems, such as the political, economic and educational system, and including the subsystem of translation, are open and adaptive (Buckley 1967; 1968). They are open in that they continually import and exchange resources, attributes and information across their boundaries as they interact with other systems in their environment. Their adaptive ability allows them to respond to disturbances and pressures from outside and, thus, to cope with stress and contingency. An important element in this adaptive ability is learning from experience, a mechanism of self-regulation which consists of the transmission of information about the system’s performance back to the system

Translational Norms & Correct Translations  101

itself so that modifications can be made to reduce the difference between actual and desired performance. In this way, instability and entropy can be avoided and the system can change and adjust while keeping its ‘essential variables’ intact. In a sociocultural system, these variables comprise material properties as well as values and beliefs. If the feedback loop works well, the system may persist in a dynamic equilibrium, with a continuous inflow of material from the environment and continual adjustments within the system, or it may improve the effectiveness of its organisation by developing further structural differentiation at certain levels – while creating tension at other levels. The role of norms in sociocultural systems can be seen in this context of feedback and self-regulation. In essence, norms are ways of allowing such systems, and the individuals and collectives within them, to cope with stress by reducing the complexity and contingency of the impulses coming from the environment. Norms restrict the variety of possible responses to such impulses by providing uniform solutions for certain types of problems. In our case, as we are dealing with a communicative system, the problems concern the selection of certain communicative means from the set of potentially available means (Bartsch 1987, 141). In a translation system, this is a matter of the range of theoretically possible options and strategies of translation on the macro- as well as on the microtextual level and the goal-directed motivation behind the actual choices made for or against particular solutions in each individual case. It may be worth stating explicitly that the basic assumption underlying the perspective I am adopting is that translation takes place in a communicative situation and that communication problems can be described in terms of interpersonal coordination problems (how to behave in a public place, how to speak to a teacher or a train conductor, how to address a local authority in writing, etcetera). Hence the similarity in function between the sociologists’ coordination norms, on the one hand, and linguistic and translational norms, on the other.

6.4 Perhaps I can explain this aspect of norms more fully by drawing on the notion of convention, understood as a social phenomenon with a regulatory function (Lewis 1969; Luhmann 1984). In his book Convention: A Philosophical Study, David Lewis gave a technical definition of convention which could be paraphrased as follows: conventions are regularities in behaviour which have emerged as arbitrary but effective solutions to recurrent problems of interpersonal coordination. Because they have proved effective, these solutions then become the preferred course of action in a given type of situation. Conventions grow out of repeated practice, they are a matter of precedent and social habit and they presuppose common knowledge and acceptance. More precisely, they imply an intersubjective web of expectations: the expectation of others that I will conform to a certain pattern of behaviour and my expectation that others expect me to conform. Conventions, therefore, are a matter of social expectations and of the expectation

102  Concepts

of expectations – that is, of reciprocal expectations, or, in Ullmann-Margalit’s words, of ‘convergent mutual expectations’ (1977, 87). Conventions, in this sense, are not norms, or they are implicit norms at best (Lewis 1969, 97; Hjort 1990, 43). They depend on regularities and shared preferences for certain courses of action in certain situations – that is, on interpersonal coordination. To the extent, however, that conventions imply acceptance, and the mutual expectation of acceptance, of ‘approximately the same preferences regarding all possible combinations of actions’ (Lewis 1969, 78), they restrict the number of practically available options in recurrent situations of a given type. They make behaviour more predictable by reducing uncertainty and contingency (Bartsch 1987, 126). Although conventions do not presuppose explicit agreements between individuals and do not depend on such agreements, they still act as generally accepted social constraints on behaviour while offering readily available templates for action. Over time, conventions may fall victim to their own success. If a convention has served its purpose of solving a recurrent coordination problem sufficiently well for long enough, the expectation that a certain course of action will be adopted in a certain type of situation may grow beyond a mere preference – that is, beyond a preferential and probabilistic expectation. It may acquire a binding character. At that point, we can begin to speak of a norm. As the regularities that have emerged as solutions to coordination problems grow into ‘a floating system of mutually conditional preferences’, norms provide the ‘anchorage’ for that floating system (Ullmann-Margalit 1977, 109). An essential aspect of a norm is that it possesses normative force, a modal ‘ought’ character, whether weak or strong. Norms, then, are similar to conventions but they are stronger and more binding. As Renate Bartsch put it in her Norms of Language (1987, 141), as regards their origin and function, norms are conventions that solve coordination problems, but they come into their own as soon as the preferences and expectations associated with conventions are conceptualised as normative expectations. Like conventions, norms act as constraints on behaviour, foreclosing certain options while suggesting others. Put another way, they are there to be taken advantage of, helping one to select a particular course of action out of a set of alternatives in a certain type of situation (Ullmann-Margalit 1977, 98). And, again like conventions, norms grow out of a series of individual occurrences and situations, but as regularity sets in, it becomes more appropriate to speak of them as applying to types or classes of situations. Novel occurrences will first be related to a given type, so as to allow the individual to judge which norm to apply. In that sense, norms can be said to involve a degree of rationalisation in problem-solving; they provide uniform solutions to certain problem types, circumventing the difficulties of solving each specific instance in the infinite variety of problem tokens (Ullmann-Margalit 1977, 86). In so doing, they facilitate the achievement of coordination – in our case, effective communication.

Translational Norms & Correct Translations  103

To the extent that norms grow out of conventions more or less spontaneously, they derive their legitimacy from the same patterns of mutual expectation typical of conventions, and they imply a similar degree of social acceptance and internalisation. At that level, they are also relatively permissive, in that non-compliance with a norm does not usually result in serious sanctions. In systemic terms, this might result in positive feedback – that is, persisting in a course of action without adjustment despite increasing entropy. In itself, non-compliance with a norm in particular instances does not invalidate the norm, which, for this reason, can be said to possess a certain counterfactual stability (Luhmann 1984, 438); it is able to cope with a relatively large amount of discrepant behaviour. Such behaviour will always occur and may even be necessary to maintain the ‘essential variety pool’ (Buckley 1968, 510) that every sociocultural system needs in order to be able to evolve over time. In other words, the existence of a norm does not preclude erratic or idiosyncratic behaviour. As the prescriptive force of norms increases in strength from the permissive to the mandatory and from the optional to the obligatory, they move away from conventions in relying less on mutual expectations and internalised acceptance and more on directives and rules, which are often formulated explicitly. When the pressure exerted by a rule becomes the sole reason for behaving in one way rather than another, we can speak of edicts or decrees. Decrees are ‘exclusionary reasons for action’ (Bartsch 1987, 77). In contrast to conventions, which are nonstatutory and impersonal and do not carry institutionalised sanctions, decrees are statutory, and they are issued by an identifiable authority with the power to impose sanctions for non-compliance. Here, we recognise the explicitly hierarchical structure of most social and sociocultural systems and the relations of power and authority prevailing within these structures. Of course, power relations are inscribed in the entire network of norms and conventions operative in societies; in the case of decrees, they manifest themselves in their sharpest form. Compared with conventions, then, decrees represent the opposite end of the normative spectrum and may be codified as obligations or prohibitions. Broadly speaking, norms cover the range between conventions and decrees.

6.5 So far, I have been dealing with the outward aspects of norms – their regulatory and problem-solving role in situations requiring interpersonal coordination, and their normative force. This may create the impression that, as these concepts are applied to the world of translation, we are faced with a somewhat mechanistic affair of stimulus and (guided) response, and not with a motivated, goal-directed, teleological practice. If so, it is time to redress the balance. For norms consist of two aspects: normative force and norm content (Bartsch 1987, 176). The content of a norm is a socially shared notion of what is correct. This notion is an intersubjective reality, and normative force is there to steer behaviour in such a way that it is in accord with the notion of correctness. Renate

104  Concepts

Bartsch’s definition of linguistic norms brings both these aspects to the fore when she says that linguistic norms are the social reality of concepts of linguistic correctness; this social reality secures the coordination concerning form and use of linguistic means in a speech community. (1987, 75) It is a definition that lends itself for virtually wholesale transfer to the domain of translation. Correctness notions, as conceptualisations of regularities in behaviour regarded as correct, are social facts. What is correct is established within a community. That also means that these notions carry and reflect the values and attitudes of at least part of the sociocultural system and the community in question. Here, again, the hierarchical structure and complexity of social systems comes into play. The dominant notions are usually those cherished by dominant groups, even though they will probably never be the only ones. More fundamentally, however, this is also a way of saying that correctness notions are culturally determined; they are culture-bound, even system-bound. The more diversified the system, the greater the diversity of correctness notions. The function of norms, then, is to secure these notions of correctness (Bartsch 1987, 70). To be able to serve as practical norms and influence behaviour, correctness notions are translated into models to be imitated. The structure of the sociocultural system and the social hierarchy within the community will largely determine what the models will be, which models are to be followed by whom, in what way and to what extent. Models, as envisaged in this context, are idealisations in the double sense: abstract representations and representations of an ideal. Norms and models are, therefore, closely linked. Models can be seen as demonstrating relevant properties or salient features of correctness notions. Norms are there to optimise behaviour in function of these ‘ideal’ models.

6.6 In terms of communicative behaviour such as using language or producing translations, norms are the guidelines that, continually and with varying degrees of force, influence the selection of communicative means with a view to making the communication conform to the models that embody correctness notions. Because norms are socially defined, compliance with them amounts to satisfying appropriateness conditions so that the acts or utterances in question are accepted as correct. To put this in terms of translational behaviour, norms allow the translator to reduce the number of potential solutions for a set of translational problems by adopting those solutions suggested by the norm as being likely to result in a target text that accords with a given model and, thus, with a certain notion of

Translational Norms & Correct Translations  105

correctness and, beyond that, with the values and attitudes alive in a community. The implications of all this should be clear, but it may be good to spell some of them out. (1) The concept of norms is a key concept both for translation studies and for the practice of translation as a social, communicative practice. Without norms, translators would probably throw up their hands in despair, as they would be unable to decide in favour of one solution rather than another. Because language is made up of discrete units, and translating involves constant decision-making, every choice is, in principle, motivated by a norm. Of course, translators may decide to ‘just translate’, but this is merely another way of saying that they are adopting the prevailing norm. They may also consciously decide to apply purely private rules of translation, but to the extent that translating is a communicative practice, its effectiveness as communication is likely to suffer as a result. (2) Considered from a systemic point of view, translational norms act as a grid that determines the way in which foreign material is to be integrated into the recipient culture. Norms reduce complexity by domesticating the ‘otherness’ of exogenous texts, whether to a large or only to a small degree, in accordance with the expectations concerning acceptability of this type of material to the receiving audience. This also means that we should think of norms in terms of their vitality, the range of problem types for which they are able to provide solutions (Edwards 1985, 150). (3) Translation remains a goal-oriented activity, as the translator strives to attain conformity with a model and uses norms as the way to reach that goal. Models provide the incentive for the adoption of specific norms. These models and norms are those of the sociocultural system in which the translator is working. The act of translating is a matter of adjusting a translation to bring it into line with a certain model and a certain correctness notion and, in so doing, secure acceptance. The ‘correct’ translation is the one that fits the correctness notions prevailing in a given system. It adopts the solutions regarded as correct for a given communicative situation, as a result of which it is accepted as correct. When translators do what is expected of them, they will be seen to have done well.   This implies a pragmatic and relativistic understanding of translation. Translation is not being defined in terms of immanent or essentialist features or conditions, such as equivalence or faithfulness, and not in terms of one or other type of correspondence with the source text either – although a certain type of correspondence is likely to be part of the correctness notion of translation, and, hence, of the norm of translation, in most sociocultural environments. My point is that compliance with the set of translational norms valid in a community amounts to fulfilling the ‘enabling conditions’ (Hjort 1990, 42) for a text to be accepted by that community as a translation. This also means that the definition of translation alive in a community

106  Concepts

can really only be reconstructed by identifying these ‘enabling conditions’, which means figuring out its dominant translational norms and models. (4) Norms are part of the workings of sociocultural systems. For the student of translation, translational norms belong to the object of study. The study of norms is a descriptive, not a prescriptive or normative activity (Bartsch 1987, 4). As an empirical discipline, translation studies should have no need to impose norms on the practice of translation. I would extend this principle even to the applied branch of translation studies. Teachers and researchers active in applied translation studies are undoubtedly right in stressing the normative aspects of models and correctness notions in the sociocultural systems to which translation caters. But I believe they should resist taking the shortcut of making those norms their own, as this conflates the discipline’s object-level (translational phenomena) with its metalevel (the scholarly discourse about translational phenomena). Unfortunately, the shortcut is a common occurrence, even among recent approaches that label themselves communicative (Hatim and Mason 1990) or integrated (Snell-Hornby 1988). Inasmuch as the pedagogical context of translator training requires normative concepts and criteria, they should be located at the object-level and might be introduced in the form of role-play; normative concepts developed in the context of translator training need to be distinguished from the concepts developed in empirical translation studies, in the way a learner’s grammar or a learner’s dictionary differs from grammatical theory and descriptive grammars or from lexicology and descriptive dictionaries. (5) Sociocultural systems are complex and adaptive entities made up of interlocking and interacting subsystems. In the 1970s, and primarily with reference to literature, Itamar Even-Zohar coined the term ‘polysystem’ to stress this point (Even-Zohar 1990). Different parts of a polysystem may develop different, even conflicting correctness notions. The diversity in non-literary spheres will not be any less great, whether we think of Bible translation or of advertisements for television. In each of these spheres, the translator may choose to cater to minority rather than to majority interests and act accordingly. (6) This complexity gives rise to competing norms and norm conflicts, which are acted out as part of an evolving historical series. As a result, no translation of any size or substance follows one norm only. As competing norms coexist and overlap, observing one norm may mean infringing another. Even the existence of a dominant norm or a dominant model does not preclude secondary norms and models. Far from translation being a binary operation in which a target text is shaped after a source text, there would always seem to be at least three major textual models that supply norms affecting the process: one deriving from the source text, one deriving from the relevant translational tradition, and one deriving from the existing set of original texts in the target culture belonging to a similar or otherwise relevant genre. In practice, there will usually be more than these three, as source texts do

Translational Norms & Correct Translations  107

not occur in isolation, and target texts are designed to slot into broader material and ideological structures. Translating is less a matter of full-scale adherence to a single overriding norm than of negotiating a multiplicity of norms to reach complex aims. (7) Finally, in view of the complexity of sociocultural systems, it will not be easy for the student of translation to establish the exact relations between individual norms and the models and correctness notions standing behind them. The relative force or permissiveness of a norm cannot really be known in advance. Furthermore, as I suggested, correctness notions reflect attitudes which extend well beyond the field of translation; attitudes regarding, for example, translatability also bear on evaluative attitudes toward one’s own language and that of others, on cognitive attitudes regarding the nature of language and of the relations between languages, on views and judgements concerning the relation between language and cultural identity, and so on. However, these are issues which bear on epistemological and ideological structures well beyond the scope of the present chapter.

Bibliography Bartsch, Renate. 1987. Norms of Language: Theoretical and Practical Aspects. London & New York: Longman. Buckley, Walter. 1967. Sociology and Modern Systems Theory. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Buckley, Walter. 1968. ‘Society as a Complex Adaptive System’. In Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist, edited by Walter Buckley, 490–513. Chicago: Aldine. Edwards, John. 1985. Language, Society and Identity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. ‘Polysystem Studies’. Special issue of Poetics Today 11, 1. Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason. 1990. Discourse and the Translator. London & New York: Longman. Hjort, Anne Mette. 1990. ‘Translation and the Consequences of Scepticism’. In Translation, History and Culture, edited by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, 38–45. London & New York: Pinter. Holmes, James S. 1988. Translated! Papers on Literary Translation and Translation Studies. Edited by Raymond van den Broeck. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kast, F.E. and J.E. Rosenzweig. 1981. ‘The Modern View: A Systems Approach’ [1970]. In Systems Behaviour, edited by the Open Systems Group, 44–58. London: Paul Chapman. Koller, Werner. 1978. ‘Äquivalenz in kontrastiver Linguistik und Übersetzungs-wissenschaft’. In Theory and Practice of Translation, edited by Lillebill Grähs, Gustav Korlén and Bertil Malmberg, 69–92. Bern: Peter Lang. Lewis, David. 1969. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1984. Soziale Systeme: Grundriss einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Schwanitz, Dietrich. 1990. Systemtheorie und Literatur. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Snell-Hornby, Mary. 1988. Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

108  Concepts

Toury, Gideon. 1980. In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. Ullmann-Margalit, Edna. 1977. The Emergence of Norms. Oxford: Clarendon. Van den Broeck, Raymond. 1978. ‘The Concept of Equivalence in Translation Theory: Some Critical Reflections’. In Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in Literary Studies, edited by James S. Holmes, José Lambert and Raymond van den Broeck, 29–47. Leuven: Acco. Wilss, Wolfram. 1982. The Science of Translation: Problems and Methods. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

7 TRANSLATION AND NORMATIVITY [1998]

So much has been written in the past 20 years about norms and their relevance to translation that it is reasonable to assume at least a certain familiarity with the concept of norms as such. Allow me, therefore, to preface my remarks with no more than a brief reminder in the form of a quotation from Thomas Merton’s 1942 essay ‘The Normative Structure of Science’. It is a very traditional statement in more ways than one, but Merton’s definition of ‘the ethos of science’ in terms of values and norms can readily be transferred from the world of the sciences to that of translation: The ethos of science is that affectively toned complex of values and norms which is held to be binding on the man of science. The norms are expressed in the form of prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences, and permissions. They are legitimized in terms of institutional values. These imperatives, transmitted by precept and example and re-enforced by sanctions, are in varying degrees internalized by the scientist, thus fashioning his scientific conscience or, if one prefers the latter-day phrase, his super-ego. Although the ethos of science has not been codified, it can be inferred from the moral consensus of scientists as expressed in use and wont, in countless writings on the scientific spirit and in moral indignation directed toward contraventions of the ethos. (Merton 1973, 268–9) The expression of norms in the form of prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences and permissions; their legitimation in terms of institutional values; their transmission through precept and example; their re-enforcement by means of sanctions (or rewards) and their overall regulative function, all have been debated and documented with reference to translation. There is not much point in going DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-10

110  Concepts

over this ground again. Instead, I should like to do two things. First, I want to suggest the productive potential of the norms concept as an analytical tool in the historical study of translation, highlighting one or two aspects that have perhaps not received the attention they deserve. I will go on to consider some implications of the norms concept and their relevance for the way we think and speak about translation. I will start by looking at a historical example to see what may be gained from a norms-based approach to it. I want to suggest that, even when we are dealing with a single translation, an approach via the concept of norms can be fruitful. My focus will be on the translator’s choices against a background of a limited range of practically available alternatives and on the possible reasons why a particular option was selected from among that range. This privileging of selectivity has two advantages. On one hand, the choices which the translator makes simultaneously highlight the exclusions, the paths that were open but were not chosen. On the other, the approach sheds light on the interplay between the translator’s responses to existing expectations, constraints and pressures and his or her intentional, goal-directed action.

7.1 De Buck’s Boethius The case I want to present is of no great historical moment. Indeed, it suits the purposes of illustration precisely because it is unremarkable, with the exception, perhaps, of one or two intriguing features that I intend to milk for all they are worth. It concerns a seventeenth-century Flemish Catholic priest, Adrianus de Buck, an obscure and now forgotten figure. Biographical details are sparse. We know of only two publications by him: a book of prayers and his translation, in 1653, of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, rendered from Latin into Dutch. The translation (of which there are only two known extant copies) appeared in Bruges, a town located in the area then known as the Spanish Netherlands. A brief historical explanation is in order here. A hundred years earlier, the whole of the Low Countries had been under the dynastic rule of the Spanish Habsburgs. In the 1560s, an armed rebellion broke out which, at one point, engulfed the entire area. The southern part – roughly, contemporary Belgium – was eventually returned to the Catholic fold and to Spanish rule. The Calvinist-dominated Northern Netherlands emerged as a de facto independent republic in the 1590s. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the north became astonishingly prosperous and powerful, witnessing the explosion of creative talent that produced the likes of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Spain formally recognised the Dutch Republic as a sovereign state in 1648. By that time, the Spanish Netherlands had been transformed into a bastion of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. De Buck’s translation of Boethius contains a dedication to local dignitaries, several other liminary texts, including the usual approbations and laudatory poems,

Translation and Normativity [1998]  111

and the main text in prose and verse. In his dedication (reprinted in Hermans 1996, 121–3), the translator leaves us in no doubt that he is green with envy at the miracle of Dutch culture in the Northern Netherlands, not least because, he says, they have translated from every other language in the world, including Greek, Hebrew, Turkish and Arabic. In other words, De Buck was acutely aware of living in what, by comparison with the thriving republic in the north, was rapidly becoming a cultural backwater. Politically, too, the Spanish Netherlands were weak and vulnerable. The threat came not from the north but from the south, as around the mid-century the area was experiencing the effects of French expansionism. The small town of Veurne (or Furnes), where De Buck was living, close to the French border, had been overrun by the armies of Louis XIV in 1646. Spanish troops retook it six years later, but by then De Buck had probably finalised his translation. In any case, hostilities continued, and the French would occupy Veurne again in 1658. Apart from these military disasters, the town had gone through an epidemic in 1645–47 that wiped out a third of the population. And now, De Buck has translated Boethius. He has done so, he tells us in the dedication, for several reasons: to offer consolation to his compatriots who have suffered at the hands of the French; because he reckons that the Protestant heretics in the north have left Boethius untranslated on account of the references to free will and purgatory in the Consolation; and partly also because he wants to prove that, as he put it, ‘the sun also shines on our West-Flemish land and there is fire in our souls, too’ (dat oock het West-Vlaender-landt van de Sonne beschenen wordt, ende dat’er oock vlamme woont in onse zielen). I will return to these statements later. The translation itself follows the prose and verse of Boethius’s Latin with corresponding prose and verse. The verse translations exhibit a curious feature in that De Buck has rendered several of the poems in Boethius not once but twice, in two different metres. A norms-based approach to translation starts from the assumption that the translation process involves decision-making on the part of the translator. It asks what choices are made in relation to available alternatives and what it is that steers translators toward one preferred option rather than another. I take it for granted that when we speak of norms, we include the entire range stretching from strict rules at one end to mere conventions (or ‘quasi-norms’, as Poltermann 1992, 17 calls them) at the other end. In addition, I prefer to think of norms not only as regularities in behaviour and as the pressure exercised on the individual to choose one option rather than another but also as sets of expectations about preferred options and as the anticipation of such expectations – that is, as the expectation of expectations. Finally, I like to think that the teleological aspect of translator behaviour comes into its own as translators consciously or unconsciously negotiate their way through and around existing norm complexes with a view to securing some form of benefit, whether personal or collective, material or symbolic. In discussing De Buck’s Boethius, let me look first at the selection of the source text and then at De Buck’s mode of translating. In this latter respect, I

112  Concepts

will consider both De Buck’s own comments on his translation and at his actual practice. My argument will be that De Buck is catering to three overlapping constituencies. First, he is writing for his compatriots as political subjects, fellow sufferers at the hands of the French; to this end, he emphasises the consolation to be had from reading Boethius. Second, he addresses his compatriots as coreligionists and self-conscious Catholics; in this capacity, he claims Boethius for the Counter-Reformation. Third, he speaks to them as cultural agents, an audience that is aware, as he is himself, of the cultural superiority of the Northern Netherlands. Accordingly, we can trace political, religious and cultural considerations informing De Buck’s decisions. We can also read the way in which De Buck negotiates the options in front of him as a strategy, a set of choices aimed at reaching a certain goal. We can view De Buck’s choice of Boethius as a source text in relation to the primary function of the translation. As De Buck explains in his preface, he wants to render a service to his compatriots as fellow citizens. We may interpret his decision to offer a translation in the first place, and not to write something of his own invention, against the background of the commonly held early modern view that to transmit the tried and tested work of a valued authority is often preferable to producing your own laborious and probably inept invention. For someone like De Buck, a provincial priest with (as far as I can tell) no long-term ambition to make his mark as a writer, the option to translate must have seemed the obvious choice. Why Boethius? Just as Boethius drew comfort from philosophical speculation when he found himself in prison awaiting execution, so the hard-pressed citizens of Flanders will derive consolation from reading Boethius in their hour of need. For De Buck, that makes Boethius an apt choice, in preference to an unspecified number of alternatives. Just how many alternatives were realistically available to De Buck is impossible to ascertain, but the list will almost certainly have included works such as Justus Lipsius’ De constantia of 1584. Lipsius had enjoyed international fame as a humanist scholar at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), also in the Spanish Netherlands. His De constantia, a dialogue in the stoic tradition, had been written, like Boethius’s Consolation, to find equanimity amid a sea of troubles and had become a European bestseller. However, the book was readily accessible to De Buck’s compatriots in a popular Dutch translation, with editions in 1584, 1621 and 1640 (Hoven 1997). In other words, considering obvious but excluded alternatives allows us to throw De Buck’s selection into relief, as we can see him making his own choice optimally relevant. In providing solace and a morale booster, his translation constitutes an answer to a perceived problem, and, indeed, his preface develops several apposite metaphors speaking of wounds and healing and of loss of material goods being outweighed by spiritual values kept intact. Two other aspects of De Buck’s choice of Boethius gain relief when we pick up his comments on the cultural and translational practices in the Northern Netherlands. De Buck notes that Boethius is not selected for translation there

Translation and Normativity [1998]  113

and that this is for religious reasons: the book’s references to free will do not fit Calvinist doctrine.1 His awareness of this ideological aspect makes his own choice deliberate but also oppositional and even polemical. His Boethius contributes to the differentiation of the Southern translational tradition vis-à-vis the North. Boethius, in this specific translation, emphatically Catholic and with some translational peculiarities like the double rendering of some of the poems, is now becoming part of the Southern cultural landscape. Because the number of practically available options for placing Boethius in a religious and philosophical context is limited (Boethius as a universal Christian? As a moral philosopher? As a neo-Platonist?), De Buck’s pointed appropriation of Boethius as Catholic also brings out these exclusions. In addition to identifying religion as a mark of difference between the Protestant Dutch Republic in the north and the Catholic Spanish Netherlands in the south, De Buck’s choice of Boethius also contributes to the refashioning of the Southern cultural tradition as such. It constitutes one small move in the deployment of translation in support of the Counter-Reformation. By presenting Boethius as a Catholic writer, De Buck not only claims Boethius for the Counter-Reformation, but he also aligns himself ideologically with the rest of Catholic Europe. If a translation offers a verbal representation of an anterior text across a semiotic boundary, and typically a representation such that it can serve as a reenactment of its source across an intelligibility barrier, then every translation constitutes a selection of a certain mode of representation from among a wider range of permissible modes. The set of permissible modes – the ensemble making up the ‘constitutive’ norms and conventions of translation – circumscribes the concept of translation in the world of which De Buck is a part. The selection which he makes determines the words on the page, the translation’s specific verbal orchestration or ‘style’. As was the case with source text selection, the choice of a style or representational mode highlights the exclusions going with it and, thus, points to the existence of alternative possibilities, of paths not chosen, as well as of certain stylistic allegiances and similar choices made by other writers and translators. In De Buck’s Boethius, some of these allegiances and exclusions are made explicit. They are thematised, or dramatised, both in the translator’s preface and in the unusual decision to render some of the Latin poems twice, in two different forms. In his preface, De Buck informs us that he has translated the title of Boethius’s book ‘in an explanatory manner’ (tot breeder verklaringh), that is, paraphrastically. What in Latin reads as a ‘book on the consolation of philosophy’ (De consolatione philosophiae liber) has, in Dutch, been expanded into a ‘comforting pharmacy of moral wisdom’ (Troost-Medecijne-wynckel der zedighe wysheyt). The rendering stresses the practical usefulness of moral philosophy in hard times. For De Buck, this paraphrastic mode is clearly a legitimate form of translating, which suggests that the concept of translation he is operating with is already internally differentiated, marked by various sets of ‘regulatory’ (as opposed to ‘constitutive’) norms

114  Concepts

and conventions. The paraphrastic rendering of the title seems to be a matter of convention only – a personal preference within an area of relatively free variation. Equally paraphrastical (een luttel wijdt-loopigh, ‘somewhat long-winded’), De Buck tells us, are the renderings of some of the verses. He confesses that, even after consulting learned commentaries, he sometimes found the Latin verses hard to grasp on account of the mixture of Aristotelian and Platonic ideas they contain. In contrast with the title, the paraphrastic rendering of the verse appears to stem from a desire to elucidate conceptual obscurity. The fact, however, that, in both these cases, De Buck feels the need to justify his use of paraphrase suggests that, although it is a legitimate form of translating, he differentiates it from routine or standard translation. This is, presumably, because paraphrase, requiring the translator to speak more overtly in his or her own name, tends to forms such as glossing, commentary and imitation. These are adjacent to and may overlap with translation, but they are not coterminous with it. In other words, through De Buck’s comments, the boundaries of translation, as he understands them, come into view as well. Then there are the double translations, in two different metres, of some of the poems. They are unexpected. Translating verse into verse was common enough at the time and, presumably, had normative force. Still, different verse forms were available to the translator, and, indeed, Boethius himself employed different metres, which makes the choice for a particular form a personal preference. De Buck does not tell us why he chose to translate some poems twice. Perhaps we have to see his decision in light of his statements about paraphrastic translation. But then the question arises: why two verse forms? If conceptual elucidation was the aim, prose would have been a more obvious choice. To my mind, the double renderings dramatise the fact that there are alternative possibilities, while also serving as displays of virtuosity to underscore a claim to professional equality vis-à-vis the translators in the North. As for the first point, the dual renderings remind the reader that the translation’s basic function, that of providing a serviceable representation of an otherwise inaccessible source text, allows for more than one stylistic option. Both poetic forms which De Buck is offering are presented as valid; both also remain metrical. Because there is no suggestion that the two options which he has chosen exhaust the range of valid modes, De Buck’s practice signals a degree of tolerance in the choice of poetic form to render poetic form. Subsequent translators may want to take up either or both models that he has supplied. But De Buck’s double translation may also be read as a bid for recognition and legitimacy by a Southern translator vis-à-vis what he evidently perceives as the more successful tradition in the North. By demonstrating skill in verse translation, the practitioner in the weaker system can claim professional equality with translators in the dominant system while still distancing himself in religious and ideological terms. In this respect, De Buck is simply exploiting the opportunity offered by the absence of a strong normative constraint governing metrical form in verse translation.

Translation and Normativity [1998]  115

As far as the prose passages are concerned, here De Buck had other priorities, those of providing solace and vindicating Boethius as a Catholic author. His vocabulary in these passages, borrowing directly from the terminological and discursive resources of Catholic theology and liturgy, helps to consolidate the hegemony of Catholic discourse in the Spanish Netherlands and, more broadly, in the vernaculars of Counter-Reformation Europe.

7.2 Translation, Norms and Values There is more in De Buck’s Boethius that merits attention but let us leave the example and briefly review the gain that may be derived from a case like this. Several things may be singled out. The first point is an obvious one. The case illustrates the heuristic relevance of working with a norms concept as a guiding tool. This does not mean using norms as causal explanations. It means exploring the whole range from conventions to norms to decrees, in different spheres and on different levels, to see how they bear on the decisions involved in the translation process. It also means weighing external pressures, acquired habits and routinely applied skills against the individual’s presumed goal-oriented design in particular circumstances. Determining what is most relevant in individual instances will remain a matter of interpretation and speculation. It is, as always, the observer who constructs the case before him or her, rendering data relevant by deploying them as evidence. Second, focusing on norms and conventions not primarily as regularities in behaviour extracted from large corpora but as sets of prevailing expectations, combined with attention to the selective aspect of the translator’s choices in the context of a limited range of available alternatives, allows for the use of the concepts of norms and conventions as a way of asking questions not merely about what is there on the page but also about what might have been there but, for one reason or another, is not. Trying to figure out what those reasons might be can prove illuminating. Assessing the exclusions lets us appreciate the significance of the inclusions. But it is time to broaden the perspective. It seems to me that there are currently several theoretical frameworks that could add resonance to the norms concept as it has been used so far in the study of translation. Some of these already left echoes in my discussion of De Buck’s Boethius. My emphasis on De Buck’s choices as meaningful selections in a differential context is indebted to the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, as is the stress on norms understood as expectations. For Luhmann, social systems consist of communications which connect over time; expectations about communications form the structure of a social system. I do not want to elaborate here on Luhmann’s systems theory as such. Suffice it to say that his voluminous writings on social systems have been applied to areas ranging from ecology and education to art history. They can be applied to the world of translation as well, as Andreas Poltermann (1992) has shown.

116  Concepts

The other name to be mentioned here is that of Pierre Bourdieu. For all the substantial differences between Luhmann and Bourdieu, both are sociologists who think in relational terms, and both are alive to issues of language and culture. As far as translational norms are concerned, their acquisition and internalisation by the individual translator can be described in Bourdieu’s terms as the inculcation of a durable, transposable disposition, a habitus, forming a link between the individual and the social. In the same way, the translator’s manoeuvring within and between norm complexes prevalent in a given field lends itself to description in terms of Bourdieu’s concept of social positions and position-takings, the accumulation of symbolic or other capital and the struggle for the monopoly of defining ‘translation’ (Van Gorp et al. 1997; Gouanvic 1997; Simeoni forthcoming). Within the descriptive and historical approach to translation, the elaboration of concepts derived from sociological theories such as those of Luhmann and Bourdieu seems a promising and exciting prospect to me. The eminently social concept of norms, assimilated into expectations or dispositions, offers a convenient point of departure. But the norms concept opens up another dimension as well. Social conventions, norms and rules are tied up with values. The content of a norm is a notion of what a community regards as correct or proper. The directive force of a norm is there to secure and maintain these values. The assumption is, roughly, that norms serve as the active ingredient by means of which general values are transmuted into guidelines and prompters for concrete action. The dominant values and norms of communities tend to reflect the hierarchies of power prevalent in these communities. If norms, understood in this sense, are relevant to acts of translation, then translation is freighted with values. In claiming Boethius as a Catholic writer, the translator shows his perception to be ideologically determined. The dislocation brought about by his translation is ideological as well as linguistic, temporal, geographical and communicative. And this is inevitable: De Buck perceives the world from his own standpoint. Moreover, because translation caters to other discourses, it has to reckon with the norms and values that prevail in the social spheres sustained by those discourses. This means that the representations and re-enactments produced by translation cannot be transparent or ideologically neutral. On that basis, I want to suggest three points. First, what makes translation interesting as a cultural phenomenon is its lack of transparency – that is, its opacity and complicity. Second, if translation puts a slant on representation, then retaining the notion of equivalence in critical thinking about translation becomes problematical. And third, if equivalence is discredited, what needs to be explained is why it has played and continues to play such a key part in the common perception and the self-presentation of translation.

7.3 Translation as an Index of Cultural Self-Reference As for the first point, we know that translations appropriate, transform and relocate their source texts, adjusting them to new communicative conditions and

Translation and Normativity [1998]  117

purposes. Just how much and what kind of attuning is prescribed, proscribed, preferred or permitted in practice will depend on prevailing concepts of translation and on who has the power to impose them. The way in which a community construes translation, therefore, broadly determines the way in which individual translations refer to their prototexts – the kind of image of the original which translations project. The anterior text to which a translation refers is not simply the source text, even though that is the claim which translations commonly make. It is, rather, a particular image of it, as André Lefevere (1992) has argued. And because the image is inevitably slanted, coloured and, to some extent, preformed, we can say that translation constructs or produces or, in Tejaswini Niranjana’s words (1992, 81), ‘invents’ its original. A community’s value system and the norm complexes that hold it in its place see to it that translation is governed by at least three normative levels: general cultural and ideological norms which apply throughout the larger part of a community, translational norms arising from general concepts of translatability and cross-lingual representation alive in that community and the textual and other appropriateness norms which prevail in the specific client system for which individual translations cater. If this is true, then the whole cognitive and normative apparatus governing the selection, production and reception of translations, together with the way in which translation is circumscribed and regulated at a certain historical moment, presents us with an index of cultural self-reference. In reflecting about itself, a cultural community defines its identity in terms of self and other. Translation offers a window on cultural self-reference in that it involves not simply the importation or imposition of certain cultural goods from elsewhere, but, at the same time, their transformation as filtered through particular, local values. Translation is of interest precisely because it offers first-hand evidence of the prejudice of perception and of the pervasiveness of local concerns. Because translations are opaque, complicit and compromised, the history of translation supplies us with a series of cultural constructions of otherness and, therefore, of self. For this reason, translations perhaps tell us more about those who translate than about the source texts which the translations purport to represent. It is the bias built into translation, the uses to which translation is put and the ways in which translation is conceptualised that gives insight into how cultures perceive themselves. Resistance or indifference to translation, or the absence of translation when it was an option, or indeed the claim to untranslatability, are as informative as the pursuit of this or that type of translation. And it is useful to bear in mind that, when translation occurs, it is always a specific and often an institutionally transmitted type of translation. Within this context, translators make choices and take up positions because they have certain goals to reach, personal or collective interests to pursue and material and symbolic stakes to defend. That is where the concrete interplay of the personal and the collective takes place. As the norms concept reminds us, translators, like those who use or commission translations, are social agents.

118  Concepts

7.4 Equivalence and Difference Let me come to my second point, the issue of equivalence. One reason why Gideon Toury’s introduction of the norms concept into the study of translation proved to be of strategic importance was that it directed attention away from the vexed notion of equivalence and focused instead on the factors governing the choices that determined the relation between translations and their originals. In Toury’s words, ‘norms […] determine the (type and extent of ) equivalence manifested by actual translations’ (1995, 61). Equivalence has, thus, effectively been sidelined. In the traditional approach, equivalence served as both the aim and precondition of translation. In Toury’s empirical approach, equivalence is reduced to a label designating the outcome of an operation called translation. Because Toury is keen to cover ‘the possibility of accounting for every kind of behaviour which may be culturally regarded as translational’, he employs the term equivalence to mean ‘any relation which is found to have characterized translation under a specified set of circumstances’ (1995, 61), or, more fully, equivalence is ‘a functional-relational concept’ standing for ‘that set of relationships which will have been found to distinguish appropriate from inappropriate modes of translation performance for the culture in question’ (1995, 86; his emphasis). Having hollowed out the notion of equivalence to such an extent, Toury decided, nevertheless, to hang on to it. He expressed ‘a clear wish to retain the notion of equivalence’, even though it has now been reduced to a ‘historical’ concept (1995, 61). And again, the study of individual translations will ‘proceed from the assumption that equivalence does exist between an assumed translation and its assumed source’, adding that ‘[w]hat remains to be uncovered is only the way this postulate was actually realized’ (1995, 86). Now, it seems to me that when we consider the primary role of norms and values in the operation and perception of translation, retaining the notion of equivalence as the outcome of translation and then simply moving on has unfortunate consequences. First stripping equivalence down to a mere label and then reintroducing it by the back door without further questioning its implications blurs the aspect of non-equivalence, manipulation, dislocation and displacement which the norms concept did so much to push into the foreground. This blurring of non-equivalence is unfortunate for two reasons. First, it is non-equivalence which constantly reminds us that the whole process of cultural transmission and interaction of which translation forms a part is governed by norms and values and by what lies behind them: power, hierarchy, non-equality. As postcolonial approaches to cultural history have shown, relations between communities and cultures are rarely relations between equals. The refusal of some contemporary Irish poets to have their work translated into English, an obvious instance of the political significance of non-translation, occurs in a context in which languages like English and Irish do not enjoy equal status. In the years following 1513, the so-called Requerimiento, which informed indigenous people in America of their place in the Spanish empire,

Translation and Normativity [1998]  119

was read to them in Spanish only; translations into local languages lacked legal validity. Around 1800, the decrees issued by the revolutionary French regime in annexed territories, such as Belgium, were issued in French only; in the Flemish region, translations into Dutch appeared alongside the French, but only the French version possessed legal force. To speak of equivalence in such cases, with its suggestion of equal value, is like speaking of translation as exchange or bridge-building, suggesting fairness, harmony and a two-way process but obscuring the one-directionality of translation and its complicity in power relations. Even if we grant semantic equivalence, that cannot undo the simultaneous non-equivalence in other and equally relevant respects which pertain to the status and role, and, therefore, the sense and significance, of translations. The second point is more paradoxical. Just as Niklas Luhmann observes that what needs to be explained is the improbability of communication because there are many good reasons to believe it is unlikely to succeed, so it seems to me that what needs to be explained as regards translation is not what kind of equivalence is manifested by translations, but why, in the face of glaring linguistic, cultural and other differences, concepts of translation have, nonetheless, emerged in which equivalence is taken for granted and given prominence. By retaining equivalence in our critical vocabulary, even in a watered-down version, we sidestep that question. The norms concept, however, should serve as a reminder that it is difference, not sameness, transparency or equality, which is inscribed in the operations of translation. Starting from difference as a prime condition, we need to account for the occurrence and durability of the unlikely notion of equivalence. One way of doing this, I suggest, is to consider equivalence as part of the cultural construction of translation. We tend to think of translation in terms of relayed communication. The translator acts as a relay station: enabler, conduit and transformer at the same time. On this side of the language barrier, we feel we can place our trust in the translator’s mediating role because we assume that the transformation has left the source message essentially intact. Although we realise that original and translation are not identical, we trust the translator’s competence, integrity and good faith and assume that the substitute message we are being offered will be a faithful reproduction, a reliable duplicate and quality replica. The standard metaphors of translation rehearse these aspects in casting translation, on one hand, as bridge-building, ferrying or carrying across, transmission, transfer, translatio, and, on the other, as resemblance, likeness and mimesis. A translation may be a derivative product, a mere copy and, therefore, secondary, but we assume that, for all practical purposes, the replica can stand in for the real thing. Trusting the replica’s ability to stand in for the real thing, however, works only to the extent that a ‘sense’ of equivalence, of equality in practical use value, has been produced. And we tend to believe that this sense of equivalence results from the reliability of the translation as reproduction. A translation, we say, is most successful when its being a translation does not get in the way and does

120  Concepts

not distract or detract from our presumption of equivalence. A translation most coincides with its original when it is most transparent. This requires that the translator’s labour leave no identifiable trace of its own. The irony, of course, is that those traces, those words, are all we have access to on this side of the language barrier. Yet we casually say that the original author’s voice is the only one that presents itself to us. We are casual about this because we also construe translation as a form of delegated speech, a kind of speaking by proxy, implying not only a consonance of voices but also a hierarchical relationship between them and the ethical imperative of the translator’s discretion. The model of translation here is direct quotation, the translator’s words appearing as if within quotation marks because they are someone else’s words, presented to us with minimal mediation. This requires that translators, too, become transparent, spiriting themselves away in the interests of the original’s integrity and authority. Only the translator who operates with self-effacing discretion can be trusted not to violate the original. In this view, transparency guarantees integrity, consonance and equivalence. The norms concept is there to remind us that what I have been describing – in the form of a caricature, perhaps, but not by much – is an illusion. We know that a translation cannot coincide with its source. It contains different words that have different meanings. Not only the language changes with translation, but so does the enunciation, the intent, the moment, the function and the context. The translator’s intervention cannot be erased without erasing the translation itself. The belief in equivalence is, therefore, an illusion as well, perhaps a pragmatically and socially necessary illusion, but an illusion, nevertheless. Whatever is taken to constitute equivalence at one level is offset by non-equivalence at other levels. Which leaves us with having to explain a paradox: if translation cannot undo difference, why is it that the presumption of equivalence has become so deeply ingrained in our standard concepts of translation? The notion of a ‘translator function’ may provide an answer.

7.5 The Translator Function In the past 30 years or so, literary theory has had repercussions throughout the humanities. It has emphasised the role of the reader in investing texts with meaning and highlighted the role of intertextuality in the production of texts that are themselves variations on existing texts. As a result, we have come to appreciate not only the inexhaustibility and irrepressibility of meaning but also, at the same time, the various conventional and normative mechanisms by means of which we have attempted to control this proliferation of meaning. In his essay ‘The Death of the Author’, Roland Barthes proposed that a text should be seen not so much as a sovereign creation but, rather, as ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (1977, 146). Readers who interpret texts set them against this backdrop of anterior phrases, discourses, plots and conventions. The meaning of a text is what individual readers extract from

Translation and Normativity [1998]  121

it rather than what the author put in. Barthes’ essay concludes by declaring that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ (1977, 148). Michel Foucault’s essay ‘What is an Author?’ (1979) continued this line of thought by enquiring into the historical construction of the concept of ‘the author’ and its role in relation to questions of knowledge and power. It posited the concept of the ‘author function’ as the ideological figure that our culture has devised to keep the proliferation of meaning within bounds by insisting on the author as a single unifying subject, with a single voice, behind the text. We, thus, suppress the more uncontrollable aspects of texts, their inflationary semantics, their potential for interpretation, their plurality and heterogeneity. Now, as Karin Littau (1993; 1996) has argued, translation pushes in precisely the direction which the ‘author function’ was designed to block. Translations compound and intensify the refractory increase in voices, perspectives and meanings; they simultaneously displace texts and produce interpretations which, as verbal artefacts, are themselves open to interpretation even as they claim to merely echo their originals. If, then, our culture needed an ‘author function’ to control the semantic potential of texts, it is not hard to see why it has also created what we might call a ‘translator function’ in an effort to contain the exponential increase in signification and plurivocality which translation brings about.2 As an ideological and historical construct, the ‘translator function’ serves to keep translation in a safe place, locked in a hierarchical order and conceptualised as derivative, delegated speech. The metaphors and oppositions by means of which we traditionally describe translation, the expectations we bring to translated texts, the self-images that translators routinely hold up and the legal constraints under which translation operates all accord with this function. Because we know translation is a controlled activity, we feel entitled to override its inherent difference and to presume equivalence. So we say we have read Dostoevsky or Boethius when we have read them in translation, just as we commonly accept that the most reliable translation is an ‘authorised’ translation, the one approved and endorsed by the author. The term itself confirms the singularity of intent, the coincidence of voice, the illusion of equivalence and the unmistakable relation of power and authority. The translator may claim authorship of the translation’s words, but we want the original author to authorise them. Historically, this hierarchical positioning of originals versus translations has been expressed in terms of stereotyped oppositions such as those between creative versus derivative work, primary versus secondary, unique versus repeatable, art versus craft, authority versus obedience, freedom versus constraint and speaking in one’s own name versus voicing someone else’s words. In each instance, it is translation which is subordinated and contained. And in case we imagine that these are natural and necessary hierarchies, we should remember that our culture has construed gender distinctions in terms of strikingly similar oppositions of creative versus reproductive, original versus derivative, active versus passive and dominant versus subservient. It is worth asking whose interests are being served by these hierarchies.

122  Concepts

It may well be, then, that the common perception of translation is that of an operation which produces equivalence. But this perception privileges equivalence at the cost of suppressing difference. The interesting thing about the norms concept, and the issue of value raised by it, is that it invites us not only to recognise the primacy of difference but also to seek to explain the tenacity of equivalence. Let me add that I do not think it necessarily follows from these remarks that translators should opt for different ways of translating. To my mind, the task of translation theory does not consist in advocating a ‘resistant’, compliant, ‘fluent’ or any other mode of translation. It consists, rather, in exploring the historical contingency of these modes together with the concepts and discourses that sustain them. The primary task of the study of translation is not to interfere directly with the practice of translation by dictating to it but to account for what happens on the ground, including the ways in which translation has been conceptualised. To the extent, however, that the historical discourse on translation blends into contemporary critical and scholarly discourses, our speaking about translation would do well to develop a self-reflexive and self-critical dimension. This takes me to my final point.

7.6 Translating Translation There is a further and somewhat awkward complication to which I want to draw attention. Its essence was neatly put by the historian Quentin Skinner in the essay ‘Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts’ (1970). Drawing on speech act theory, Skinner addressed the problem of how to assess the force of statements made in a different environment or in the past. As Skinner pointed out, the problem ‘is neither philosophically trivial in itself, nor in the practice of [history and anthropology] can it be readily overcome’ (1970, 136). We can represent it as involving a person A, at a time and/or place t2, who is trying to make sense of an utterance by a speaker S who was speaking at time and/or place t1. Of course, A has to be sufficiently familiar with the concepts and conventions available to S at t1 to be able to grasp the meaning of S’s words and the force that speaker S’s enunciation must have registered when it was produced. In addition, Skinner went on, A should be capable of performing some act of translation of the concepts and conventions employed by S at t1 into terms which are familiar at t2 to A himself, not to mention others to whom A at t2 may wish to communicate his understanding. (ibid.; emphasis added, TH) In other words, if we moderns want to understand what Boethius intended to say when we ‘overhear’ his De consolatione philosophiae, we have to know enough of Boethius’s time and place to grasp both the meaning of his words and the force registered by his uttering those words then and there. It is worth remembering

Translation and Normativity [1998]  123

that this ‘knowing’ on our part is already a construction determined by our perception and our conceptual categories. In addition, however, we need to be able to translate Boethius’s concepts and conventions into our modern terms, especially if we wish to talk or write about our understanding of Boethius. What if the object of our attention is not Boethius but a translation of Boethius? If we want to understand De Buck’s translation of Boethius, we not only need to have a sense of De Buck’s concepts and of his practice of translation, we also need to be able to translate his concepts and his practice of translation into our terms. To understand and speak about someone else’s translation, we must translate that translation and the concepts informing it. Our accounts of translation are themselves a form of translation. Two things follow from this. First, if descriptions of translation are performing the operations they are simultaneously describing, the distinction between object-level and metalevel becomes problematical. Descriptivists, myself included, have been keen to keep object-level and metalevel apart, but it turns out the object constantly contaminates its description (as, indeed, Bakker 1995 has argued). The scholarly study of translation is implicated in the self-description of translation as a cultural construct. Second – and here norms come back into the picture – in translating other people’s concepts of translation (or whatever term they use which we reckon we can translate as ‘translation’), our accounts are unlikely to hold up a transparent image. They must be based on concepts of translation. As we saw, precisely because translation is norm-governed and impregnated with values, it cannot be diaphanous, innocent, transparent or without its own intermingled voices. As translations, then, our descriptions are subject to all the manipulations that come with translation. The nature and direction of these manipulations are socially conditioned and, hence, significant for what they tell us about the individuals and communities in question, that is, about ourselves. The study of translation rebounds on our own categories, assumptions and modes of translating translation. This is not new. Like other branches of the human sciences that cannot escape entanglement in the objects they engage with, the discourse about translation, too, is obliged to render ‘translation’ into its own terms. The issue becomes acute when we move beyond our immediate horizon. It surfaces when we wish to speak about translation as a transhistorical or transcultural phenomenon or when we seek to understand what a culture distant from our own means by whatever terms are used there to denote something that appears to match our ‘translation’. There are no ready solutions to this epistemological paradox, but there may be ways of coming to terms with it. Luhmann’s system theory may be one of them, if only because Luhmann is conscious of the fact that observers cannot, at one and the same time, observe an object and their own observation of it. But let me look in another direction, one which is closer to the world of translation and which will lead us back to the notion of norms.

124  Concepts

It is, perhaps, in cases in which cultural differences are particularly stark that the issues come to the fore most clearly. That is why we may be able to learn most from a discipline such as anthropology. Edmund Leach recognised back in 1973 that, for ethnography and anthropology, ‘the essential problem is one of translation’, adding optimistically that ‘social anthropologists are engaged in establishing a methodology for the translation of cultural language’ (Leach 1973, 772). They found that establishing such a methodology was harder that they had imagined. The difficulty of the task can be illustrated with reference to a single example. Early in the twentieth century, German missionaries who lived for many years among the Nuer of the southern Sudan had concluded that the Nuer possessed a concept of ‘religious belief ’ similar to the sense that Westerners had of ‘religious belief ’. It is possible, of course, that the missionaries’ assumption of translatability, which assimilated the Nuer conceptual world to their own, also facilitated the missionary endeavour itself. Their agenda may, consciously or unconsciously, have led them into self-fulfilling assumptions. When, subsequently, the ­ethnographer Edward Evans-Pritchard studied the Nuer in the 1940s and 1950s, he emphasised the incompatibility of the Nuer concepts and beliefs with Western, Christian terms. He highlighted the formidable problem, first, of understanding something which is alien but (presumably, hopefully) approachable through patient ‘contextual interpretation’ and then of articulating that understanding in a language such as English – that is, in terms that are tainted by our concepts, history and values. It was Evans-Pritchard who, in a lecture in 1951, described the central task of ethnography as ‘the translation of culture’ (Needham 1978, 8). An extended reflection on the problems connected to the ‘translation of culture’ is presented in Rodney Needham’s Belief, Language, and Experience (1972), which traces Evans-Pritchard’s account of Nuer beliefs. Needham points out, for example, that, if we want to compare the German missionaries’ interpretation of the Nuer terms with Evans-Pritchard’s, we need to assess what adjustments of Nuer, English and German would be required to express the Nuer terms in the other two languages. When we know from what perspective and with what intention certain Nuer terms were bent or nudged in the direction of the other languages, we get an idea of the basis on which translation was considered feasible. We could then ascertain how comparability, commensurability and, hence, translatability had been construed. But, as Needham (1972, 222) shows, there is no metalanguage to carry out such a comparison. That metalanguage could only be constructed on the basis of the comparability of cultural concepts, but the concepts can only be compared on the basis of an already existing ideal metalanguage, which leads to a vicious circle. We cannot escape from perspectival observation, value-ridden interpretation and compromised translation. Still, what Evans-Pritchard called ‘contextual interpretation’ can guard against the danger of rashly and reductively translating another culture’s concepts into our terms. I assume Clifford Geertz (1983) had something similar in mind when he stressed the need for the ethnographer’s participant observation as a way of

Translation and Normativity [1998]  125

gaining insight from within the foreign culture. Speaking in the broader context of the social sciences, Craig Calhoun (1992) recently argued that social theory should recognise the cultural construction of putatively universal categories, pointing out that cross-cultural understanding involves translation problems in the attempt to grasp ‘linguistic meanings which are not simply different from our own, but involve incommensurable practices’ (1992, 253). He went on to suggest that translation is perhaps not a good description of cross-cultural understanding, as the latter is a process which must change the observer, enabling him or her to play two incompatible cultural games simultaneously without translating the rules and practices of one into those of the other (1992, 256). While Calhoun’s point about the social construction of putatively general categories pinpoints the issue, it is hard to see how translation can be avoided in the context of cross-cultural understanding, especially if, in addition to gaining understanding, researchers wish to communicate their findings to their own communities. Here, the somewhat more charged terminology which Eric Cheyfitz employs in his Poetics of Imperialism (1991) proves helpful. Cheyfitz explores the entanglement of translation with metaphor. Accounts of metaphorical language have traditionally been based on the distinction between literal, proper and legitimate usage versus the figurative, improper and deviant usage characteristic of metaphor (1991, 88–121). Translation appropriates the foreign and normalises the abnormal in the proper words of our own language. Cheyfitz describes how the early European explorers and settlers in North America translated the indigenous population into their own conceptual system and, in the same move, into their material property system. Writing Native Americans into a European context meant refiguring and translating the other into European schemes. Given the power relations involved, this also meant imposing European terms and categories. Nowhere is this historically more evident than in the very definition of the other as ‘savage’, as one who lacks something essential and valuable that we possess and he or she ought also to possess but does not, or possesses in some improper, perverse way which must be put right – whether it be script or scripture, fixed dwellings, certain moral standards or forms of social organisation or, indeed, clothes or breeches. Faced with the radically different, we construe commensurability by translating on and into our terms. And our terms are culturally conditioned. They do not square with the idea of equivalence, linguistic or otherwise. When we engage in historical and cross-cultural studies of translation, we translate other people’s concepts and practices of translation on the basis of our own contingent concept of translation, including its normative aspect and the values it secures. We have no other choice. But having become aware of the problem inherent in our descriptions, we can devise strategies that acknowledge as much. That ought to be part of the ethos of the discipline. In this respect, too, we can learn from other areas of study. In recent decades, ethnographers have become acutely conscious of their discipline’s roots in colonial history and of its present-day entanglement in structures of power and domination. As a result,

126  Concepts

ethnography has become markedly more self-reflexive and self-critical, aware of its own historicity and institutional position, its presuppositions and blind spots and the pitfalls of representation. In the study of translation, we ignore these issues and debates at our peril. It should be part of the critical practice of our discipline to acknowledge the normativity of our own representations of translation and, thus, to account for the conditioning of our translation of translation.

Notes 1 Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae had been translated in the Northern Netherlands by the independently minded D.V. Coornhert (1522-90), who saw himself as a universal Christian. Coornhert’s translation appeared in Leiden in 1585 and was reprinted in Amsterdam in 1616 and 1630. A year after De Buck’s 1653 translation, Coornhert’s version was reissued in revised form by François van Hoogstraten, an Erasmian with Catholic sympathies (Dordrecht 1654, 1655). De Buck’s assessment is therefore broadly correct. 2 Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz 1985 also speaks of a ‘translator-function’ but without explicitly basing her usage of the term on Foucault; see also Robinson 1997, 61-77. Rosemary Arrojo (1997, 31), too, has recently spoken of a ‘translator function’ with reference to Foucault.

Bibliography Arrojo, Rosemary. 1997. ‘The “Death” of the Author and the Limits of the Translator’s Invisibility’. In Translation as Intercultural Communication, edited by Mary SnellHornby, Zuzanna Jettmarová and Klaus Kaindl, 21–32. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Baker, Mona. 1998. ‘Norms’. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 163–5. London & New York: Routledge. Bakker, Matthijs. 1995. ‘Metasprong en wetenschap: Een kwestie van discipline’. In Vertalen historisch bezien, edited by Dirk Delabastita and Theo Hermans, 141–62. ’s-Gravenhage: Stichting Bibliographia Neerlandica. Barthes, Roland. 1977. ‘The Death of the Author’ [1968]. In Image, Music, Text, edited by Roland Barthes, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–8. London: Fontana. Boethius, Severinus Manlius Torquatus. 1653. Troost-Medecijne-wynckel der zedighe wysheyt. Translated by Adrianus de Buck. Bruges: Lucas vanden Kerchove. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. Raisons pratiques. Sur la théorie de l’action. Paris: Seuil. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1996. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel. London: Polity. Calhoun, Craig. 1992. ‘Culture, History and the Problem of Specificity in Social Theory’ In Postmodernism and Social Theory, edited by Steven Seidman and D.G. Wagner, 244– 88. Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell. Cheyfitz, Eric. 1991. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Díaz-Diocaretz, Myriam. 1985. Translating Poetic Discourse: Questions on Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Rich. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Evans-Pritchard, Edward. 1956 Nuer Religion. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Translation and Normativity [1998]  127

Foucault, Michel. 1979. ‘What is an Author?’. Translated by Josué Harari. In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Poststructuralist Criticism, edited by Josué Harari, 141–60. London: Methuen. Geertz, Clifford. 1983. ‘Art as a Cultural System’. In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, edited by Clifford Geertz, 94–120. London: Fontana. Gouanvic, Jean-Marc. 1997. ‘Translation and the Shape of Things to Come’. The Translator 3, 125–52. Harris, Brian. 1990. ‘Norms in Interpretation’. Target 2, 115–19. Hermans, Theo, ed. 1996a. Door eenen engen hals. Nederlandse beschouwingen over vertalen 1550–1670. The Hague: Stichting Bibliographia Neerlandica. Hermans, Theo. 1996b. ‘Norms and the Determination of Translation: A Theoretical Framework’. In Translation, Power, Subversion, edited by Román Álvarez and CarmenÁfrica Vidal, 25–51. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Hermans, Theo. 1997. ‘Translation as Institution’. In Translation as Intercultural Communication, edited by Mary Snell-Hornby, Zuzanna Jettmarová, and Klaus Kaindl, 3–20. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hoven, René. 1997. ‘De constantia’. In Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) en het Plantijnse huis, edited by Francine de Nave, 75–81. Antwerp: Museum Plantin Moretus. Leach, Edmund. 1973. ‘Ourselves and Others’. The Times Literary Supplement 6 July 1973, 772. Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London & New York: Routledge. Lewis, David. 1969. Convention: A Philosophical Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Littau, Karin. 1993. ‘Intertextuality and Translation: The Waste Land in French and German’. In Translation: The Vital Link, edited by Catriona Picken, 63–96. London: Chameleon. Littau, Karin. 1996. ‘Translation in the Age of Postmodern Production: From Text to Intertext to Hypertext’. Forum for Modern Language Studies 33, 81–96. Luhmann, Niklas. 1986. ‘Das Kunstwerk und die Selbstreproduktion der Kunst’. In Stil. Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Diskurselements, edited by H.U. Gumpert & K.L. Pfeiffer, 620–72. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Luhmann, Niklas. 1990. ‘Weltkunst’. In Unbeobachtbare Welt. Über Kunst und Architektur, edited by Niklas Luhmann, F.D. Bunsen and Dirk Baecker, 7–45. Bielefeld: C. Haux. Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Translated by John Bednarz Jr. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Merton, Thomas. 1973. ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ [1942]. In his The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, edited by Norman W. Storer, 267–78. Chicago & London: Chicago University Press. Needham, Rodney. 1972. Belief, Language, and Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pagden, Anthony. 1993. European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Poltermann, Andreas. 1992. ‘Normen des literarischen Übersetzens im System der Literatur’. In Geschichte, System, Literarische Übersetzung/Histories, Systems, Literary Translations, edited by Harald Kittel, 5–31. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Pym, Anthony. 1995. ‘European Translation Studies, “Une science qui dérange”, and Why Equivalence Needn’t Be a Dirty Word’. TTR 8, 153–76.

128  Concepts

Robinson, Douglas. 1997. What is Translation? Centrifugal Theories, Critical Interventions. Kent & London: Kent State University Press. Simeoni, Daniel. Forthcoming. ‘The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus’. Target. Skinner, Quentin. 1970. ‘Conventions and the Understanding of Speech Acts’. The Philosophical Quarterly 20, 118–38. Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Van Gorp, Hendrik, ed. 1997. ‘The Study of Literature and Culture: Systems and Fields’. Special issue, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 24, 1.

8 THE TRANSLATOR’S VOICE IN TRANSLATED NARRATIVE [1996]

8.1 When the Russian president Boris Yeltsin speaks through an interpreter, do we really want to hear the interpreter’s voice? We listen, surely, because we want to know what Yeltsin has to say. To the extent that we are conscious of hearing the interpreter’s voice, it is as no more than a minor distraction. We regard – or better, we are prepared and have been conditioned to regard – the interpreter’s voice as a carrier without a substance of its own, a transparent vehicle. Anything that takes away from this transparency is unwelcome ‘noise’ in the information-theoretical sense of the term. At the same time, we know perfectly well that, unless we understand Russian, the interpreter’s voice is all we have to make sense of on this side of the language barrier. Even when, on radio or television, we can still hear Yeltsin’s Russian in the background, we do not understand those words, and we shut them out, realising they are being broadcast alongside the interpretation only to authenticate the interpreter’s re-enunciation. We are not unduly bothered about not having direct access to Yeltsin’s language because we know we can trust the interpreter’s professionalism. We trust that the interpreter’s words are an accurate and truthful reproduction of Yeltsin’s words. This trust, underpinned by professional and institutional guarantees, allows us to accept, or to project, the interpreter’s discourse as matching Yeltsin’s, as constituting the equivalent of it, as coinciding with it and being, for all intents and purposes, identical to it. Of course, as soon as we stop to reflect on the various asymmetrical interlingual and intercultural processes taking place in the operation, we realise that we are entertaining an illusion. The translation does not coincide with its source, it is not identical or equivalent in any formal or straightforward sense and it remains to be seen how the notion of the one discourse ‘matching’ the other is to be filled in. But the illusion is there, and necessarily there. It is part and DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-11

130  Concepts

parcel of what we, in our culture, have come to understand by ‘translation’. It fits, that is, our ideology of translation, which is backed up by a large amount of translation theory and history and by all manner of institutional agreements governing relations between primary and secondary texts, up to and including such things as intellectual ownership, copyright law, authorised translations, legally certified copies, professional codes of conduct and so on. Translation, in this context, is delegated speech, and the delegate has no executive powers. The necessary illusion, then, is one of transparency and coincidence as exponents of equivalence. As the interpreter’s voice falls in with, coincides with and, in so doing, paradoxically, disappears behind Yeltsin’s voice, the physical experience of hearing two distinct voices speaking more or less simultaneously, is suppressed, or sublimated, and in practice, we consider the two voices to be wholly consonant. Even as we listen to the one voice that we are able to follow, we negate its presence because we recognise its substantial and institutionally endorsed conformity to the primary enunciation, which, we accept, possesses integrity, authority and, therefore, primacy. We conclude that ‘Yeltsin has said so and so’. Because it has no substance of its own, the re-enunciation in the other language assumes the quality of a direct quotation.1

8.2 Although interpreting, as a rule, involves the simultaneous physical presence of two individuals and two voices, there are good grounds for arguing that very much the same factors, and the same illusion of transparency and coincidence, are at work in written translation, including translated fiction. Perhaps the illusion is even stronger here. Consider for a moment a certified translation of a degree certificate. The stamp issued by a third party declaring the translation to be a ‘true copy’ of the original reminds the user that this is a translation; the stamp marks the distance between original and translation (often also identifying the translator by name), but, at the same time as formalising their different status, it asserts that the copy is ‘as good as’ the original. Next, consider a translation, say, of a safety regulation in a large international company, which first issues the new regulation in the head office and then has it translated into a number of languages for use in its subsidiary plants. In each country, this version becomes one regulation among others, and the translators’ interventions, including their proper names, are erased. Whether the translators are the firm’s own employees or the job was contracted out to an agency, all concerned have every reason to take it for granted that the translation constitutes a truthful copy of the original. Translators, after all, like interpreters, speak in someone else’s name, and, thus, they are expected to subscribe to what Brian Harris has called the ‘true interpreter’ or the ‘honest spokesperson’ norm, which requires that people who speak on behalf of others […] re-express the original speakers’ ideas and the manner of expressing them as accurately as

The Translator’s Voice [1996]  131

possible and without significant omissions, and not mix them up with their own ideas and expressions. (Harris 1990, 118) The translator is expected to observe strict discretion. Although today, many works of translated fiction routinely carry the translator’s name and, in this respect, resemble a ‘certified copy’, in the way they are read they are mostly closer to the second case just mentioned. While reading translated fiction, readers are normally meant to forget that what they are reading is a translation. The translator withdraws behind the narrating voice. So, whose voice comes to us when we read a translated novel? Common usage is indicative. We tend to say that we are reading Dostoyevsky, for example, even when we are reading not Russian but English or French or Spanish words. This blotting out, the erasure of the translator’s intervention, is paradoxical. In contrast to oral interpreting, with two speakers sharing a physical space, when we read translated fiction, we have only the translated text in front of us. The primary voice, the authoritative, originary voice, is, in fact, absent. And yet, we say it is the only one that presents itself to us. And, in practice, we do so largely, perhaps wholly, on the strength of the hierarchy implied by the order (and, more often than not, the size) of the names on the title page: NOVEL by Writer X Translated by Translator Y The question arises: is the illusion of ‘I am reading Dostoyevsky’ all there is to it? Does the translator, the manual labour done, disappear without textual trace, speaking entirely ‘under erasure’? Can translators usurp the original voice and, in the same move, evacuate their own enunciatory space? Exactly whose voice comes to us when we read translated discourse? The question can be examined from a variety of angles, including an ideological one. In what follows, it is treated first and foremost as a narratological issue, asking about the voice that produces the discourse that we read, which means asking about the discursive centre from which the text issues. Let us remind ourselves of the standard representation of narrative communication:2 [Biographical Author] [Biographical Reader] | | Implied Author Implied Reader | | Narrator Narratee | | Text (Story – Fabula)

132  Concepts

This scheme represents the standard situation, without reference to translation. What we read is a discourse produced by a narrator. In translated fiction, who articulates the translated discourse? Is it the same narrator as in the source text? Does this then mean that the translator, as biographical translator, is like the biographical author: another name on the title page, indicating an entity located outside the narrative discourse? Narratology does not usually distinguish between original and translated fiction. The main narratological models currently available (Booth, Stanzel, Genette, Rimmon-Kenan, Bal, Chatman, Prince) are designed to apply to narrative texts in general, irrespective of whether they are original or translated. In what follows, I will argue that these models overlook a presence in the narrative text that cannot be fully suppressed.3 Translated narrative discourse, I will claim, always implies more than one voice in the text, more than one discursive presence. Even though in many narratives this ‘other’ voice never clearly manifests itself, it should, nevertheless, be postulated on the strength of those cases in which it is manifestly present and discernible. It is only, I submit, the ideology of translation and the illusion of transparency and coincidence that blinds us to the presence of this other voice.

8.3 The claim, then, is that translated narrative discourse always contains a ‘second’ voice, to which I will refer as the translator’s voice, as an index of the translator’s presence in the text. The voice may be more overtly present or less. It may remain entirely hidden behind that of the narrator, rendering it impossible to detect in the translated text. It is most directly and forcefully present when it breaks through the surface of the text, speaking for itself, in its own name, for example, in a paratextual translator’s note employing an autoreferential first person identifying the speaking subject.4 And then there are shades and degrees in between. As far as I can make out, the ‘other’ voice in translated narrative texts is likely to manifest itself primarily in three kinds of cases. In each case, there is a certain pressure on the translator to come out of the shadows and directly intervene in a discourse which the reader had been led to believe spoke with a single voice. They are (1) cases in which the text’s orientation toward an implied reader and, hence, its ability to function as a medium of communication is directly at issue; (2) cases of self-reflexiveness and self-referentiality involving the medium of communication itself; (3) certain cases of what, for want of a better term, I will refer to as ‘contextual overdetermination’. In each case, the degree of visibility of the translator’s presence depends on the translation approach that has been adopted and on the consistency with which

The Translator’s Voice [1996]  133

it has been carried through. Because each of the three cases listed, and certainly cases (1) and (2), involve a kind of communicative short-circuiting, a fissure within the discourse which draws attention to the linguistic and pragmatic displacement that comes with translation, the resulting incongruity in the translated text needs to be accounted for in one way or another. Some translation strategies will effectively paper over the cracks and leave the reader unaware of the other voice. My interest here is in those instances in which the translated text itself shows visible traces of a discursive presence other than the ostensible narrator. Before illustrating the case with reference to a particular set of translations, a further word about the first two cases mentioned above; the third will be elucidated later, with reference to a concrete example from the novel to be discussed. As for (1), unlike interpreting, in which speaker and interpreter more or less simultaneously address a physically present but linguistically mixed audience, written translations normally address an audience which is not only linguistically but also temporally and/or geographically removed from that addressed by the source text. To the extent that a reader is implied by and implicated in the overall ‘intent’ (Chatman) and orchestration of narrative fiction, translated narrative fiction addresses an implied reader different from that of the source text because the discourse operates in a new pragmatic context. All texts are culturally embedded and require a frame of reference shared between sender and receiver to be able to function as vehicles for communication. The various forms of displacement that result from translation (Folkart 1991, 347ff. speaks of a ‘décalage traductionnel’) threaten this shared frame of reference. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that it is precisely with respect to the cultural embedding of texts, for example, in the form of historical or literary references and allusions, that the translator’s voice often directly and openly intrudes into the discourse to provide information deemed necessary to safeguard adequate communication with the new audience. As a rule, of course, translations, and certainly modern translations of canonical literary fiction, stop short of redirecting the discourse so radically that the orientation to the original implied reader disappears altogether. The translated text can, therefore, be said to address a dual audience and, thus, to have a ‘secondary’ implied reader superimposed on the original one. This can lead to hybrid situations in which the discourse itself appears attuned to one type of reader here and another there, showing the translator’s presence in and through the discordances. As for (2), ‘self-reflexiveness’ and ‘self-referentiality’ are used here as rather broad terms covering various instances which Jacques Derrida and others have discussed as exemplifying untranslatability. Obvious cases are texts which affirm their being in a particular language or which exploit the economy of their idiom through polysemy, wordplay and similar devices. We are dealing, then, with instances in which language collapses upon itself, as it were or, as Derrida would have it, ‘re-marks’ itself. It is, of course, possible that the translated text solves the problems so discreetly that no trace of a ‘second voice’ is left behind. But sometimes translations run into contradictions and incongruities which challenge the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief; or the translated text may call

134  Concepts

on the explicit intervention of a translator’s voice through the use of brackets or notes, and they then remind the reader of this other presence stalking a purportedly univocal discourse. Examples of linguistic self-referentiality are not hard to find, and they are not restricted to narrative texts. In translations of many of Derrida’s essays, metalinguistic notes or comments are added by translators to cope with the French puns. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in ‘Survivre: Journal de bord’, where the lower band of the page, the ‘journal de bord’, openly challenges the translator to render the French puns (such as ‘pas de méthode’, ‘point de méthode’, or the series ‘écrit, récit, série’) in the upper band; again and again, the English translation has recourse to square brackets in an effort to keep up, overtly displaying the translated nature of the text by showing the translator’s hand (as in, for example Derrida 1991, 256ff.). Derrida’s discussion, elsewhere,5 of a rather different instance of language affirming itself concerns the final chapter of Descartes’s well-known Discours de la méthode, in which, in the French original, the author declares that his book is written in French and not in Latin. The Latin translation omits this sentence to avoid the self-contradiction of a statement in Latin declaring it is not in Latin. Derrida regards this as a case of institutional and statutory untranslatability, which is a perfectly valid observation. For the reader of the Latin version, however, the omission is not detectable and, therefore, does not reveal the translator’s presence in the translated text as such. In translations into languages other than Latin, in which the sentence is translated, the self-contradiction may be less glaring, but it is still obvious enough. When the English version has, ‘And if I write in French […] rather than in Latin […] it is because [...]’ (Descartes 1968, 91), the anomaly of reading an English text which declares, in English, that it is actually in French creates a credibility gap which readers can overcome only be reminding themselves that this is a translation. But in so doing, those readers also realise that the voice producing the statement cannot possibly belong to Descartes, or to Descartes only. There is an additional voice in play, duplicating and mimicking the first one, but with a timbre of its own. Derrida himself exploits the paradox in his 1984 address ‘Ulysse gramophone’, which opens with the sentence, ‘Oui, oui, vous m’entendez bien, ce sont des mots français’, and leads to an inevitable, if selfconscious, self-contradiction in the English translation, ‘Oui, oui, you are receiving me, these are French words’ (Derrida 1992, 256).

8.4 In the following pages, I will illustrate these points in more detail, with reference to several translations of a single book, the Dutch novel Max Havelaar by Multatuli, first published in 1860. With its complex narrative structure, Max Havelaar provides instances not only of cultural embedding and linguistic selfreferentiality but also of ‘contextual overdetermination’, all of which, to varying degrees, bring the translator’s voice to the textual surface. I will refer to two English translations, by W. Siebenhaar (1927) and Roy Edwards (1967, reissued

The Translator’s Voice [1996]  135

as a Penguin Classic in 1987) and to the French and the Spanish translations by M. Roland Garros (1968) and Francisco Carrasquer (1975), respectively. There are other translations, including older renderings into English and French as well as versions into German and other languages, but the four considered here will do for the purposes of the present exposition. The Dutch text referred to is the standard scholarly ‘historical-critical’ edition (1992), which is based on the novel’s fifth and last edition (1881) to appear during the author’s lifetime.6 The biographical author of Max Havelaar is Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820– 1887), who wrote under the pseudonym Multatuli. The novel was dedicated to Everdine Huberte van Wijnbergen.7 In its barest essence, the book tells the story of Max Havelaar, a Dutch civil servant in the colonial administration in the Dutch East Indies in the 1850s. Witnessing the exploitation of the local population by the native élite, he protests, in vain, to his immediate superior. When he ignores the administrative hierarchy and brings a charge against the local ruler, he is relieved of his post and resigns in disgust. The novel’s unusual richness springs at least in part from its narrative structure and its use of different narrators. The opening chapters employ the homodiegetic narrator Batavus Droogstoppel, a coffee broker living in Amsterdam and the epitome of Dutch petty-bourgeois values and hypocrisy. One day, Droogstoppel runs into a former schoolmate, the now destitute Sjaalman, who leaves him a bundle of documents which Droogstoppel reckons he can use for a book on the coffee trade. He does not write that book himself but delegates the task to a young German trainee in his firm, the romantic Stern who, assisted by Droogstoppel’s son Frits, and probably helped by Sjaalman himself, writes an altogether different book, which is being composed as we read. Stern, thus, becomes the narrator of the dramatic story of Max Havelaar and his wife, Tine, in the East Indies. As the novel continues, Droogstoppel occasionally breaks into Stern’s narration to voice his disapproval of the way Stern is handling his material. In the Havelaar episodes, meanwhile, the Stern narrator dishes up other stories as well as documents purporting to authenticate Havelaar’s conflict with his superiors. The novel’s concluding pages contain the main surprise, as another first-person narrator, identifying himself as Multatuli, suddenly takes over from Stern, dismisses Droogstoppel and addresses the Dutch king with an impassioned plea to stop the oppression of the indigenous population in the East Indies. The different narrative levels in Max Havelaar may be represented schematically as follows:

Batavus DROOGSTOPPEL (in Amsterdam) = the first I-Narrator Droogstoppel addresses the Dutch reader (‘you’)

→ Droogstoppel delegates narration of the Sjaalman documents to STERN (in Amsterdam) = the second I-Narrator Stern addresses the Dutch reader (‘you’)

136  Concepts



→ Stern tells the story of Max Havelaar and his wife, Tine, in the Dutch East Indies Final pages: ‘I, Multatuli’ takes over as Narrator from both Stern and Droogstoppel = the third I-Narrator Multatuli addresses himself directly to the Dutch king (‘you’)

As it happens, there is in Max Havelaar an instance similar to the Descartes case mentioned above. At one point, Max Havelaar quotes a poem in French, which he says he wrote himself and which is also reproduced in French (MH, 127). Because Havelaar is Dutch, the poem serves as a signal to the reader, suggesting Havelaar’s literary talent and linguistic abilities, implicitly contrasting him with the dreary Droogstoppel. The French translation, unable to translate the French poem into itself, merely quotes it (Garros, 186). But it adds a translator’s note: ‘En français dans le texte (N.d.T.)’.8 The reason for rupturing the discourse and intervening by means of a paratextual note is obvious: the surplus value signalled in the original by the use of a different language risks being lost on the French reader. The note itself, however, with or without its curious ambiguity (‘dans le texte’ is redundant if it means the French text which the reader is reading, so it must refer to the Dutch original), reminds its readers that this is a translated text. At the same time, it alerts them to the presence of an altogether different voice, one that breaks through the narrative voice ostensibly established by the discourse. In contrast, a poetic dialogue in German also reported by the narrator as having been penned by Havelaar (MH, 157–60) is left, unannotated, in German in the French translation (Garros, 225–8), revealing not a glimpse of the translator’s presence, except, perhaps, in the dissonance between a note that identifies as French the language of a French poem in a French text while remaining silent on how to read a poem in a foreign language.

8.5 Before going on to consider examples of different ways in which, and degrees to which, the translator’s presence makes itself felt in translations of Max Havelaar, it may be useful to point out that they all concern instances in which the presence of an enunciating subject other than the narrator becomes discernible in the translated text itself. This means we are not looking at cases in which only the comparison with the source text will show the intervention of a (biographical) translator, however revealing these manipulations, additions or omissions may be from an ideological or other point of view. In the Havelaar narrative, for example, the Stern narrator, at one point, describes the layout of Havelaar’s house in the Indies. In the Dutch original, and in the French translation, this is done by means of numbers: imagine a rectangle divided into 21 compartments, three across, seven down, and so on (MH, 136; Garros, 198). In both the Spanish

The Translator’s Voice [1996]  137

and the English versions, diagrams are added as visual aids, without paratextual comment (Carrasquer, 190; Edwards, 224). The Spanish and English texts themselves provide no discernible trace of a linguistic subject other than the narrator as the source of the diagrams, and, consequently, the intervention by (presumably) the biographical translator can be detected only through a comparison with the source text. Instances such as these are not relevant to the argument being pursued here. Hence, although the cases highlighted below mostly issue from source text cruxes, they do not focus on the retrospective comparison between translation and original. Rather, as different translations opt for different solutions, some bring the translator’s discursive presence into view, while others do not or do so to a lesser extent. In each case, the assumption is that, during the reading process, the dominant conception of transparent translation in modern fiction sees to it that the reader’s awareness of reading a translation lies dormant, thus, leaving intact the notion that (with the exception of embedded narrative and character speech) there is only one narrator speaking at any one time. As long as there are no markers in the text suggesting another voice is making itself heard, all is well. The following instances, then, concern places in which another presence insinuates or parachutes itself into the text, breaking the univocal frame and jolting the reader into an awareness of the text’s plurivocal nature.

8.6 A couple of examples will suffice to illustrate cultural references which, as a result of the displacement brought about by translation, threaten to be left in a vacuum and prompt the translator to rupture the narrative frame by means of paratextual notes. In chapter 9 of Max Havelaar, in a passage marking a sudden transition from Stern as narrator of the Havelaar story back to Droogstoppel as narrator of his own story, reference is made to Abraham Blankaart, a fictional character from the eighteenth-century Dutch novel Sara Burgerhart (1782) by Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken. The name is first dropped in the Stern narrative and then taken up by Droogstoppel. Its recognition requires a Dutch cultural frame of reference, as is evident from Droogstoppel’s comment that his own son Frits has obviously been lending young Stern a hand, for, as he puts it, ‘this Abraham Blankaart is much too Dutch for a German’ (MH, 95). Ironically, in a note added by Multatuli himself to the fourth edition (1875) and retained in subsequent editions (Multatuli 1992, vol. 2, xxxvii), he wondered how many of his own generation still recognised the literary allusion (MH, 263), suggesting that, even within a specific cultural tradition, shared frames of reference are time-bound phenomena. Both English translations and the Spanish version, at this point, break into the text to insert a translator’s note explaining the reference (Siebenhaar, 122–3;

138  Concepts

Edwards, 134–5; Carrasquer, 155–6).9 The French translation retains the name, without an explanatory note; a second occurrence of the name, in the next paragraph, is omitted (Garros, 142–3). This seems consistent and, at first sight, does not allow the reader a view of the French translator’s discursive presence. But before this passage, other instances have occurred in which translator’s notes, identified as such, explained linguistic or cultural issues arising from the source text (Garros, 36, 38, 58, 60, 87, 108 and passim). This inconsistency in the provision of paratextual information designed to safeguard the shared frame of reference creates a disparity at the discursive level: the voice which came to the rescue on other occasions, remains inexplicably silent here. The conspicuous silence, withholding information which is expected, signals the presence of a discursive subject different from either of the two narrators whose words we are reading. And because we are reading a translation, this ‘differential voice’ can only be that of the translator.10 A similar inference can be made with respect to the proper names in several of the translations. Max Havelaar is set in a particular place and time: the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies in the 1850s. The names of the Dutch characters are recognisably Dutch. Some, such as Havelaar, Bastiaans, Busselinck, Verbrugge, are proper names in the conventional sense; others are more Dickensian, suggestive names, holding out an invitation to the reader to activate their latent semantic load. Roy Edwards’s English translation copies most of the names intact, including, for instance, the suggestive ‘Droogstoppel’ (paratextually annotated as meaning ‘Drystubble’, ‘Dryasdust’, which is the way the name was rendered in the two previous English translations). With a name such as Slimering (in the Dutch: Slymering), luck is on the translator’s side, as minimal adaptation preserves the satirical intent without revealing the translator’s presence. But the pompous preacher Wawelaar appears in the text as Parson Blatherer, creating a sudden incongruity within the pattern of proper names which stretches the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief – an obviously Dutch character, in a Dutch setting, with so transparent and apposite an English name, yet without explanation? Given the otherwise consistent discourse of the narrators delivering the story, the source of the disparity must surely be attributed to another discursive presence.

8.7 The name of the character Sjaalman in Max Havelaar is a special case. Initially, this is not a proper name at all, as Droogstoppel, the narrator at this point, declines to tell us the person’s real name (which the reader will infer later). The designation is first introduced as a descriptive term (‘the man with the shawl, or scarf ’), then contracted into ‘de Sjaalman’ (‘the Shawl-man’); Droogstoppel subsequently decides to continue to call him ‘Sjaalman’ as if that were the man’s name. The first occurrence of the designation is accompanied by Droogstoppel’s metalinguistic comment to the effect that his son, Frits, prefers the English word

The Translator’s Voice [1996]  139

‘shawl’ to Droogstoppel’s good old Dutch ‘sjaal’. It is the first in a series of linguistic quibbles through which Droogstoppel reveals himself as an obnoxious pedant: In-plaats van een behoorlyken winterjas, hing hem een soort van sjaal over den schouder – Frits zegt: ‘shawl’, maar dit doe ik niet – alsof hy zoo van de reis kwam. (MH, 10) The various translations render the passage as follows: Instead of a suitable winter coat, he had a kind of shawl hanging over his shoulder – Frits says ‘Châle’: he is learning French, but I keep to our good old language – as if he had just come from a journey. (Siebenhaar, 12–13) Instead of a decent winter coat he had a sort of scarf dangling over his shoulder – we call it a sjaal in Dutch, so Frits has to call it a ‘shawl’, which isn’t even right, just to show off his English – as if he – the scarf-man, I mean – was just back from being on the road. (Edwards, 27) Aunque en lugar de llevar gabán, como habría sido lo propio, colgaba de sus hombros una especie de bufanda or largo chal – Frits dice pañuelo de cuello, pero yo no paso por ahí – como si acabara de llegar de algún viaje. (Carrasquer, 22) Au lieu d’un pardessus convenable, une sorte de châle couvrait ses épaules, comme s’il rentrait de voyage. (Garros, 36) Garros (in this instance) and Carrasquer have both opted to leave the fictional universe untouched and not to upset the reading process, as neither text leaves the language the reader is engaged in. Garros omits Frits’s use of a foreign term, and Carrasquer employs an intralingual variant. As Sjaalman’s descriptive designation turns into a proper name, the Spanish version continues with ‘Chalman’. At that stage, the French translation runs into a linguistic problem. Because ‘homme au châle’ will not double up as a proper name in French, the transition from designation to name cannot take place within the terms first set out for it. The problem is solved by cutting into the text’s linguistic homogeneity. The next occurrence has, ‘Un jour, le Sjaalman que j’avais devant moi était avec nous’, and the novel term ‘Sjaalman’, more than halfway between designation (‘le Sjaalman’) and proper name (‘Sjaalman’ capitalised), is elucidated in a translator’s note: ‘Littéralement: homme au châle (N.d.T.)’ (Garros, 38). But the linguistic transgression, the note and the fact that the reference is to the source language of

140  Concepts

a translation, break the narrative frame. The agent responsible for this discursive act cannot be the narrator. Siebenhaar solves the ‘sjaal/shawl’ problem by substituting ‘shawl/châle’, English/French for Dutch/English, culturally not dissimilar as a pair, so the reader’s awareness that Droogstoppel is, in fact, Dutch and speaks Dutch, remains dormant. Edwards’s triad ‘scarf/sjaal/shawl’ does remind the reader of Droogstoppel’s native language, and more than that, because Dutch is not only the language of Droogstoppel as a character and homodiegetic narrator but also, inescapably, the source language of the novel as a whole. The occurrence, in the translated text, of a metalinguistic statement bearing coincidentally on both the fictional world (Droogstoppel as a fictional character) and its framing context (a novel translated from the Dutch) highlights a paradox. As readers, we accept the convention, which also operates in historical fiction or in narratives set in foreign lands, that we read words in one language while we know that the fictional characters, to the extent that they resemble lifelike individuals existing in identifiable locations, must have spoken a different language. In this crux in the English Max Havelaar, the metalinguistic reference draws attention to that convention itself. This is no doubt partly because it involves the source language of the whole work, of which the translator’s paratextual notes remind us time and again. A further reason is that the ‘sjaal/shawl’ issue is only one of a series of similar instances of linguistic point-scoring between Droogstoppel and his son, some of which are presented within the terms of the English language, while others draw on Dutch. These disparities within the discourse itself prevent the conventional suspension of disbelief and bring into focus the linguistic as well as pragmatic displacement consequent upon the act of translation. The following passage provides additional illustration. This is Droogstoppel again, carping at Frits regarding a point of language: en dat ook de suikerraffinadeurs – Frits zegt: raffineurs, maar ik schryf nadeurs. Dit doen de Rosemeyers ook, en die doen in suiker. Ik weet wel dat men zegt: geraffineerde schelm, en niet: geraffinadeerde schelm. (MH, 29) and that also the sugar – raffinadeurs – Frits says refiners, but I write raffinadeurs; this the Rosemeyers do also, and they are sugar people; I know, one speaks of a refined scoundrel, and not a raffinadeur scoundrel.… (Siebenhaar, 36) and that the sugar refiners, raffinadeurs as we say in Dutch – Frits says raffineurs but I say raffinadeurs; the Rosemeyers do too, and they’re in sugar. I know one talks about a geraffineerd scoundrel, and not a geraffinadeerd scoundrel. (Edwards, 54)

The Translator’s Voice [1996]  141

y que también los refinadores (Frits dice ‘refineros’, pero yo hago como los demás, incluídos los Rosemeyer, y eso que trabajan en el ramo del azúcar; ya sé que se dice un carterista ‘refino’ y no refinado […]). (Carrasquer, 53) et que les raffineurs de sucre et les marchands d’indigo dussent y joindre les leurs. (Garros, 61) Again the Spanish translation solves the linguistic problem within its own linguistic terms, and the French version has suppressed it altogether. Neither allows a glimpse of the translator’s discursive presence. Both English versions go beyond their own language. The Siebenhaar translation has Droogstoppel using a non-existent English word (the Oxford English Dictionary does not list ‘raffinadeur’) coupled with Frits’s ‘refiners’. Apart from the psychological inconsistency in Droogstoppel as a character/ narrator who normally insists on solid Dutch values and is here found using a term which the English reader might conceivably (if erroneously) take to be French, there is little to suggest another voice speaking alongside the narrator’s. In the Edwards version, Droogstoppel specifically refers to Dutch as his own language, bringing in three terms: ‘refiners’, ‘raffinadeurs’ and ‘raffineurs’. Curiously, Droogstoppel’s discourse short-circuits itself here, as he writes, in English, ‘sugar refiners’, only to declare in the same breath, ‘but I say raffinadeurs’, a Dutch word. The issue of whether scoundrels are ‘geraffineerd’ or ‘geraffinadeerd’ will not only be lost on the English reader (both forms contain Dutch morphemes) but also draws further attention not just to Dutch as the real language of Droogstoppel’s fictional world but also to the language of a book which, when the fictional narrative is shattered in the final pages, closes with a direct address by a Dutch citizen (see below) to the Dutch king. This pulls the different levels of language which are involved very close together: the language of the fictional characters and narrators, the language of Multatuli’s address to the king, and the source language of the translation. What is striking in the English Havelaar, however, is not so much the paradoxical nature of this situation – convention keeps that under control – but the linguistic anomaly in Droogstoppel’s own usage as it is presented in Edwards’s version. That anomaly points to a different discursive locus, not reducible to Droogstoppel’s speech act.

8.8 Max Havelaar is a complex novel not only because of its different narrative levels but also because it plays, ingeniously and decisively, on the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. A crucial aspect of this is the way in which the narrative levels are connected. Some of these links are immediately obvious; others are established piecemeal, through association, inference and a number of subtle shifts and hints.11 In this way it gradually dawns on the reader that Max

142  Concepts

Havelaar, who only appears as a character in Stern’s narrative set in the Dutch East Indies, is, in fact, the same person as the Sjaalman who, in the opening chapters, runs into Droogstoppel in Amsterdam and leaves him the documents from which Stern will construct the Havelaar story. Stern also copies the correspondence detailing Havelaar’s conflict with his superiors. However, when Multatuli himself takes over in the book’s final pages, he radically changes the perspective, emphasising the factual truth underlying the fictionalised Havelaar story (including the factual truth of the correspondence) and declaring that the novel form itself was a mere ploy because the book is really a tract written in selfjustification. Together with a number of other indications (detailed in Sötemann 1972, 67–9, 276–80), this leads to the conclusion that Havelaar, Sjaalman and Multatuli are all the same individual, and linking the most deeply embedded narrative level, the Havelaar story, with the framing discourse and the name on the book’s cover and title page. In the narrative, Havelaar’s wife is called Tine, but she has a handkerchief with the letter E embroidered in a corner, her grandfather is a ‘Baron van W.’, and we also learn her initials: E.H.V.W. In the Droogstoppel narrative, Sjaalman’s wife is never mentioned by name, but there are certain parallels with Tine. The book’s dedication is to ‘E.H.v.W.’ in the manuscript and first three editions and, from the fourth edition onward, in full to ‘Everdine Huberte Baronnesse van Wynbergen’ (MH, 1). This leaves little doubt that the person in question is the wife of – well, of a pseudonym? The author’s name Multatuli is evidently a pen-name (Latin: multa tuli), which the bearer himself translates in the text, ‘I, Multatuli, “who have borne much”’ (‘ik, Multatuli, “die veel gedragen heb”’, MH, 235) just as it is said several times of Havelaar that he had suffered much. The author behind the pseudonym Multatuli is Eduard Douwes Dekker. Tine, or Everdine, then, is the wife of Eduard Douwes Dekker, the inventor of Multatuli.12 The chain of identification, that is, stretches beyond the pseudonym to the biographical author, exploding the fictional frame and revealing the book as, at least in part, autobiographical: Douwes Dekker = Multatuli = Sjaalman = Havelaar, and the Author = Narrator = Character (Genette 1991, 83). It is also possible, of course, to read the claim to factual truth in the novel as being made within the limits of the fictional world presented by the narrative. The buck then stops with Multatuli rather than with Eduard Douwes Dekker. In that case, the dedication is presumably also part of the fictional universe, and Everdine/E.H.v.W. is then indeed the wife of Multatuli. But this does not affect the identification of Havelaar’s wife with Multatuli’s dedicatee. Now, at the novel’s deepest narrative level, the story of Max Havelaar, we are at one point presented with a conversation between Havelaar, his wife Tine, and some Dutch friends; they discuss the fact that Mrs Slotering, a native woman who is the widow of Havelaar’s predecessor and who lives in the same compound as the Havelaars, prefers to keep to herself. Tine remarks that she can very well understand Mrs Slotering’s keenness to run her own household (we learn the real reason later). In the Dutch original, she asks her husband:

The Translator’s Voice [1996]  143

‘Weet je nog hoe je myn naam vertaald hebt?’ to which Havelaar replies: ‘E.H.V.W.: eigen haard veel waard.’ (MH, 121) In the translations the exchange is rendered as follows: ‘Do you remember how you once translated my initials?’ ‘E.H.V.W. Eigen haard veel waard.’ Translator’s Note: Own hearth great worth (One’s own hearth is worth a good deal). (Siebenhaar, 159) ‘Do you remember how you once translated my initials: E.H. v. W.?’ ‘Yes. Eigen haard veel waard.’ Translator’s Note: ‘Literally “one’s own hearth is worth much”. Cf. “There’s no place like home”.’ (Edwards, 170) ‘¿Te acuerdas de cómo interpretaste mis iniciales como si fueran siglas de una máxima: E.H.V.W.?’ ‘Ya lo creo: ‘Eigen Haard, Veel Waard.’ Translator’s Note: ‘Literalmente: “El propio es el hogar que mucho vale”, pero aquí se refiere a que vale mucho lo que uno hace y la casa propia gana si la administra y cuida la misma dueña. Las iniciales corresponden a: Everdina Huberta van Wijnbergen.’ (Carrasquer, 199) [Omitted] (Garros, 179) The extent to which the initials are ‘contextually overdetermined’ will be clear by now. Both the immediate pragmatic context of the conversation and the complex chain of identification linking the fictional character Tine with the book’s dedicatee bear directly on the passage. This severely reduces the translator’s room for manoeuvre, as the task consists of combining the initials (ultimately, those of a historical person and, therefore, not open to manipulation) with an appropriate four-word proverb in which each word begins with a certain letter. Even the Spanish translation, which on other occasions coped with metalinguistic

144  Concepts

statements within the terms of Spanish, is at a loss here. The French version omits the exchange, sacrificing one of the strongest links in the identification chain, which in turn directly affects the book’s status as representing fact or fiction (irrespective of whether the claim to factual truth is seen as being made within the fictional world only). In doing so, however, the translated French text, as it stands, shows no trace of the translator’s discursive presence. In the Siebenhaar, Edwards and Carrasquer versions, a sudden abyss opens up, even if we leave the translator’s notes out of account. As in some of the other examples listed above, the translated discourse operates under the convention that, although Havelaar and company are Dutchspeakers, we read their words, and the presentation of their actions, in English or Spanish. This convention routinely spans the credibility gap by putting in place a suspension bridge, the willing suspension of disbelief. This convention collapses here. Because the Havelaar circle, in this scene as in most other scenes in the book, is monolingual, the sudden shift from English or Spanish to Dutch and back again creates a severe discursive anomaly, a crevice. Oddly enough, the narrator appears not to register the anomaly; the voice leaps out of and back into its language as if it spoke independently of its linguistic medium. It is the other voice, the one which coproduces the text, the translator’s voice, which picks up on the disparity and provides an explanation in the form of a paratextual note. The note, in each case, also translates the untranslatable. In the source text, Tine’s question regarding Havelaar’s having ‘translated’ (vertaald) her initials into a proverb rather than a proper name, prompts an intralingual response: the initials transposed into a proverb. In the English and Spanish versions, we get what we expect of translation: an interlingual shift. But instead of transforming the unfamiliar into the familiar, the shift (from English/Spanish to Dutch in the text) only produces an incomprehensible string (eigen haard veel waard), the opposite of translation. Because the discourse itself does not remark on this incongruity, the assumption must be that this is Dutch, Havelaar’s ‘real’ language, which we knew was there but were meant to gloss over, but also, coincidentally, the ‘original’ language of the book as a whole. The translator’s note confirms this by translating the Dutch proverb (though not the initials, for that transposition, barring a linguistic fluke, can only take place in Dutch) and showing the intractability of the problem. In invoking, explicitly or not, the book’s dedication and, thus, going beyond the immediate Havelaar scene, the note brings the translated nature of the entire discourse into the picture, selfreferentially and self-reflexively. The combination, then, of the non-translation of the initials, the reversal to Dutch and the deferred translation of the Dutch proverb defines the discursive position of the translator’s voice.

8.9 The discussion in the preceding paragraphs was designed to show the presence of the translator’s voice, as a discursive presence, in translations of Max Havelaar. If the points made have any validity, it is worth considering some broader and

The Translator’s Voice [1996]  145

more general claims. Indeed, while we may have been concerned with the detail of one particular novel, and a particularly complex one at that, the issue would appear to be of some wider theoretical import. What the discussion of Max Havelaar in translation will have shown is that the translator’s voice is always present as a coproducer of the discourse. The translator’s voice may remain hidden behind the voice(s) of the narrator(s) for long stretches. In some narratives, it may never become clearly discernible at all, and in those cases, we have to fall back on positing an implied translator as the source of the translated text’s invention and intent. However, the inference from the Max Havelaar case must be that it is not only reasonable but necessary to postulate the translator’s discursive presence in translated fiction because it is possible to cite specific cases which clearly bring this ‘other’ voice to the surface, for example, in instances in which its intervention is seen to cater to the needs of the target text reader (as a consequence of the cultural and pragmatic embedding of texts and the displacement resulting from translation), or in cases in which the discourse short-circuits itself through linguistic self-referentiality or contextual overdetermination. Hence, even in those instances in which the translator’s discursive presence is not directly traceable, it is a presence that must be posited, just as we must also posit a target-culture implied reader superimposed on the source-culture implied reader. It also follows that, if a theoretical model of narrative communication is to be comprehensive, it must create room for instances such as those highlighted here. This makes untenable the model of translated narrative which simply assumes that every enunciation has a source (every text implies the presence of a voice producing it) and that the translator’s presence does not interfere with that discursive situation, being located outside it as the reporting voice which repeats, verbatim, the words spoken by the first voice. That model, simplified, looks like this: (text) [I say: (text)] {I translate: [I say: (text)]} What is needed, rather, is a model of translated narrative which accounts for the way in which the translator’s voice insinuates itself into the discourse and adjusts it to the displacement which translation brings about. The model, that is, needs to incorporate the translator as constantly coproducing the discourse, shadowing, mimicking and, as it were, counterfeiting the narrator’s words, but occasionally – caught in the text’s disparities and interstices, and paratextually – emerging into the open as a separate discursive presence. Giuliana Schiavi (1996) has argued the theoretical case for an implied translator and adjusted the standard model to reflect this. In practice, many translated narratives, indeed, do not allow us to go further than the terms of that model because what has been called

146  Concepts

here the translator’s voice and the translator’s discursive presence in the text is wholly assimilated into the narrator’s voice. It is only in specific cases that the ‘other’ voice becomes dissociated from the one it mimics. The question arises: why do current approaches to narrative have this blind spot when it comes to the translator’s voice? Why do we, as readers, prefer to ignore this ‘other’ discursive presence? The reason, it seems to me, lies in the cultural and ideological construct which is translation. This takes us back to the dominant concept of translation in our culture: translation as transparency and duplicate, as not only consonant but coincident and, hence, for all intents and purposes, identical with its source text; the view of translation as reproduction, in which the translation is meant to reproduce the original, the whole original and nothing but the original; the image of a translation being as good as its original except as regards status. A translation is a ‘good’, ‘proper’ or ‘real’ translation, we tend to say, if there are no loose ends, no foreign bodies; it should not contain anything that might affect the integrity of the original. Translators are good translators if and when they have become transparent, invisible, when they have spirited themselves away. Only a translator who speaks ‘under erasure’ can be trusted not to violate the original. The loyal absence of the one guarantees the primacy and aura of the other. This hierarchy governing the relation between original and translation is nothing new. Deep down, of course, we know, as soon as we stop to think about it, that the oppositions in which we have placed translation are constructs. But they still structure our way of thinking because they are ingrained in our mental habits and projections. To abandon them, and to abandon the control mechanisms which they keep in place, would be to upset established hierarchies, to deny the primacy and inviolability of the original, to stress the intertextual transformative streak in all writing, to assert the plurivocality of discourse. And to let in plural voices means destabilising and decentring the speaking subject, creating the prospect of a runaway inflation of voices and meanings.13 Translation, therefore, needs to be controlled, to be kept under the lid. It is controlled through the ideology of transparency, identity, reproduction and the translator’s disappearance from the translated text. This allows us to suppress the loose ends, the hybridity of translation; we pretend they do not exist or ought not to exist, so as not to endanger the notion of univocal speech, the single voice issuing from an identifiable source. So, we say that we read Dostoyevsky and that we hear Yeltsin because we do not want to hear the translator’s voice. But as this essay has tried to demonstrate, that discursive presence is there, not only in exceptional circumstances in unusually complex novels, but always. A translation addresses an audience different from that addressed by the original. If this adjustment calls for the recognition of a target-culture implied reader, for positing an implied translator and for the possibility of discerning the translator’s discursive presence in certain cases and under certain circumstances, then there is nothing to prevent extending this principle from translated narrative to translated discourse in general. Translation is irreducible; it always leaves loose ends and is always hybrid, plural and different.

The Translator’s Voice [1996]  147

Notes 1 The notion of translation as re-enunciation, and its relation to quotation and reported speech, is taken from Barbara Folkart (1991). 2 Different theorists use different terms for the various elements in the diagram. The triad ’text’, ‘story’ and ‘fabula’ is from Mieke Bal (1985). I follow Rimmon-Kenan (1983), Chatman (1978, 1990) and others in assuming an implied author and an implied reader, despite Genette's reservations (1983). 3 This makes the present essay complementary to Giuliana Schiavi's ‘There is Always a Teller in a Tale’ (1996), which argues the case for positing an implied translator in the translated text. My focus is on those instances in which another discursive presence, another voice, becomes discernible in the text itself. Both essays posit an implied reader specific to the translated text. 4 In the case of a paratextual note, there is a difference between a translator's note and other possible notes. In the context of narrative fiction, notes are normally attributed to a narrator and signal the intervention of a different narrator or a switch to a different narrative mode (as in, say, John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman). In principle, translator's notes could be presented in the same way and be indistinguishable from other notes (that is, be detectable only through comparison with the original). However, in our translational culture, the translator's professional ethos and other institutional rules and conventions forbid this option; translator's notes are normally identified as such. This gives them a different status, which raises a theoretical problem. The main point, however, is the observation that translator's notes break through the narrative discourse in a way different from other notes; the voice which produces the translator's notes is a different voice, with a full-bodied identity of its own. 5 In Ulysse gramophone (1987) and in Du droit à la philosophie (1990); Segers 1994. 6 I will, henceforth, refer to the Dutch text (volume 1 of the 1992 scholarly edition) as MH. The translations will be referred to by the name of the translator (Siebenhaar, Edwards, Carrasquer, Garros) immediately followed by the page number. 7 In the fifth edition (1881), the dedication is ‘To the revered memory of Everdine Huberte, Baroness van Wijnbergen, faithful wife, heroic, loving mother, noble woman' (MH, 1). The manuscript (printed edition: Multatuli 1949) bears only the dedicatee's initials: ‘To E.H.v.W.' (Multatuli 1949, 1). The importance of the dedication will become clear later. 8 ‘N.d.T.' stands for `Note du Traducteur’ (Translator's Note). Interestingly, the abbreviation makes it clear that the producer of the note is the translator as a textual presence, a voice, not to be confused with the biographical translator. How else to explain the use of the masculine (generic?) ‘Traducteur' when it was Mme Roland Garros who translated the book? 9 In view of what was said in Note 3, this raises the question of how Multatuli's notes (from the 1875 edition on) relate to translator's notes. Both are paratextual and, as such, interrupt the narrative flow. Because Multatuli is both a narrator in the text and the name on the cover and title page of the book (which, as we shall see, plays on the distinction between fiction and non-fiction) and because the introduction to the notes (MH, 239–46) clearly indicate that he is their provider, the linguistic subject of these notes is beyond doubt. They appear as a kind of editorial intervention, associated with the name on the cover and title page rather than with the 'I, Multatuli' who introduces himself as a narrator in the book's final pages. This is partly because Multatuli-as-narrator does not appear until the very end and partly because many of the comments go well beyond the novel's narrative world (for example, in commenting on the editor of the first edition of 1860). 10 The term `differential voice’ is Barbara Folkart's, who, in the section in question, develops an argument similar to mine: `le ré-énonciateur ne se manifestera dans l'énoncé qu'il produit que sous forme de déviances, tant pragmatiques et référentielles que

148  Concepts

sémiologiques’. She goes on to speak of `un ensemble hétéroclite de déviances (dont la saisie requiert une analyse plus ou moins poussée, du moins une confrontation avec le texte de départ...)’ (Folkart 1991, 394–5). As I hope to have shown, the translator's `differential voice’ can be discerned in the translated text without confronting it with the source text. 11 The following discussion is indebted to Sötemann 1972, a classic and detailed study of the structure of Max Havelaar. Because Sötemann's study refers to the printed edition of the manuscript (Multatuli 1949), it does not address issues such as those raised in Note 8 regarding the 'editorial’ status of the notes in the 1875 and subsequent editions. 12 Everdine van Wijnbergen died on 13 September 1874, which may explain the extended dedication in the fourth edition (see Note 5), which came out in October 1875 (Multatuli 1992, vol. 2, 538). Although in the manuscript and the first three editions of Max Havelaar, the initials E.H.v.W. do not explicitly identify the dedicatee as the author's wife, the conclusion is inescapable, as indeed Sötemann (1972, 23, 275ff.) has shown. 13 This is an idea which Karin Littau developed in several seminars and conference papers, with reference to Foucault, Barthes and Derrida; see Littau 1993.

Bibliography Bal, Mieke. 1985. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Translated by Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1991. Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader. Edited by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge. London & New York: Routledge. Descartes, René. 1968. Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Translated by F.E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Folkart, Barbara. 1991. Le conflit des énonciations. Traduction et discours rapporté. Candiac: Editions de Balzac. Genette, Gérard. 1972. ‘Discours du récit’. In Figures III, edited by Gérard Genette, 65–281. Paris: Seuil. Genette, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsestes. La littérature au second degré. Paris: Seuil. Genette, Gérard. 1983. Nouveau discours du récit. Paris: Seuil. Genette, Gérard. 1991. Fiction et diction. Paris: Seuil. Harris, Brian. 1990. ‘Norms in Interpretation’. Target 2, 115–19. Hermans, Theo. 1988. ‘On Translating Proper Names, with Reference to De Witte and Max Havelaar’. In Modern Dutch Studies: Essays in Honour of Peter King, edited by Michael Wintle, 11–24. London: Athlone. Littau, Karin. 1993. ‘Intertextuality and Translation: The Waste Land in French and German’. In Translation the Vital Link, edited by Catriona Picken, 63–9. London: Chameleon Press. Multatuli. 1927. Max Havelaar or the Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company. Translated by W. Siebenhaar, with an introduction by D.H. Lawrence. New York: A.A. Knopf.

The Translator’s Voice [1996]  149

Multatuli. 1949. Max Havelaar of de koffij-veilingen der Nederlandsche Handel-maatschappij. Edited by Garmt Stuiveling. Amsterdam: Van Oorschot. Multatuli. 1968. Max Havelaar. Translated by Mme Roland Garros. Paris: Editions Universitaires. Multatuli. 1975. Max Havelaar o las subastas de café de la Compañía Comercial Holandesa. Translated by Francisco Carrasquer. Barcelona: Frontera. Multatuli. 1987. Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company. Translated by Roy Edwards. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Multatuli. 1992. Max Havelaar of de koffiveilingen der Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappy. Edited by A. Kets-Vree. 2 vols. Assen & Maastricht: Van Gorcum. Pym, Anthony. 1992. Translation and Text Transfer: An Essay on the Principles of Intercultural Transfer. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 1983. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London & New York: Methuen. Schiavi, Giuliana. 1996. ‘There is Always a Teller in a Tale’. Target 8, 1–21. Segers, Winibert. 1994. ‘Derrida’s onvertaalbaarheidsweb’. In Bouwen aan Babel, edited by Raymond van den Broeck, 89–100. Antwerpen & Harmelen: Fantom. Sötemann, A.L. 1973. De structuur van de ‘Max Havelaar’. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff.

9 THE TRANSLATOR AS EVALUATOR [2010]

How often do we consciously read translations together with their originals? I guess the answer is: not very often. Except when, as teachers or students or researchers, we are comparing one with the other, the engagement with a translation alongside its original must be a rare and fleeting occurrence, restricted, by and large, to scanning bilingual notices and signs, official documents, subtitles and surtitles, the occasional bilingual edition of a text and, beyond written translation, some interpreting situations. In the majority of cases, we have recourse to a translation because we have no or only imperfect access to the original, physically or cognitively. Bearing this in mind, it is surprising that discussions of the role of the translator as communicator routinely draw on the comparison between a translation and its original. For most readers, the original is not accessible, at least not readily so. In what follows, therefore, I will take a different line. It seems to me that, if we are to understand the social functioning of translation, we need to pay attention to the translated discourse as it reaches its audience. This means concentrating on the translation by itself and resisting the urge to check it against the original. To this end I would like to propose some approaches and concepts that allow us to capture the way translators act out their mediating role in the presentation of their translations. Recourse to the original is strictly optional. Recourse to other translations, however, is a factor. True, relatively few readers consult and compare different translations of the same original, but they can do so if they wish, and, more importantly, our expectations of what translation is and does are shaped by the translations we have encountered in the past. I am concerned solely with texts that function as translations. So-called covert translations, provided they are so comprehensively covert that nothing leads us to treat them as translations, are not translations in this functional sense. I also take it for granted that a translation cannot be equivalent to its original. A translation that is equivalent to its original, that is recognised as equivalent and functions as DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-12

The Translator as Evaluator [2010]  151

such, ceases to be a translation and becomes a version on a par with the original, one version among other versions of the same work (Hermans 2007, 1–25). This means that, if a translation is elevated to the rank of an equivalent version and, consequently, ceases to be a translation, there cannot be a translator either. It follows, conversely, that, for as long as a translation is recognised and functions as a translation, a translator’s discursive position is necessarily inscribed in it. As a communication separate from the original and reporting this original to an audience, a translation must have a speaking subject. Of course, translators may strive to create an illusion of equivalence, and a convincing illusion requires projecting a disembodied or at least anonymous translator (Pym 1992, 51–2), but this merely means that the translator is playing hard to get or hard to spot. Even if they make themselves so thin that we remain unaware of their presence or see right through them, they are still there. It is a matter of devising the methodological means to capture their positioning. It seems to me that we can tease out the presence of a translator in a translated text in a number of ways.

9.1 Display Translations represent originals. In order to bring about the resemblance that enables translations to speak for their source texts, translators re-enact – or, as Cecilia Wadensjö (1998, 247) puts it, they ‘replay’ – those originals, and they may do this so adroitly that we almost take the re-enactment for the original, in which case we largely forget about the translator’s speaking self for the duration of the performance. But Wadensjö usefully contrasts ‘replay’ with ‘display’. Whereas ‘replay’ indicates the relation between translation and original, ‘display’ draws attention, self-referentially, to the individual character of the replay or reenactment, to the choice of the specific mode of representation that the translation exhibits, in contrast with other modes that were also available. Display holds the translation’s chosen mode of representation up for inspection, as it were, and signals that it could have been different. In other words, display flaunts the manner of representation that an individual translation exhibits against the backdrop of possible alternatives. The information value of the display consists in the difference between the actual and the possible, the choices that were made and the choices that could have been made but were not. It does not matter whether the choices made amount to an idiosyncratic or a subversive or an ostentatious or an entirely conventional translation style. In each case, a given, concrete form gains relief by being set against its other side, that which could have been there but has remained potential. The distinction between display and replay allows us to discern the translator in the very positioning that the individual choices taken together add up to. Even in the case of a translation striving for the illusion of equivalence, the choice for anonymity and transparency is not part of the replay but of the display. The translation keys its re-enactment in a certain manner, and this keying is distinct from the re-enactment itself.

152  Concepts

Translations are part of the historical continuum of culture. If the difference between what is and what might have been provides a clue to the way translators position themselves, it will pay to look for intertextual links that tie different translations of the same original together. Assuming that different translations of the same original are likely to have at least some elements in common, if only at the level of propositional content, their similarity supplies a shared element against which to gauge their differences and, hence, their individual signatures. Here is a particularly blatant, literary example. In the second book of Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas tells of the destruction of Troy and the killing of the Trojan king Priam, whose body was unceremoniously dumped outside the city. This is how John Dryden’s 1697 translation of the Aeneid describes the corpse: On the bleak shore now lies th’abandoned king, A headless carcass, and a nameless thing. (Andrews 1968, 55) To the second of these two lines, Dryden added a marginal note: ‘This whole line is taken from Sir John Denham’ (Davis 2008, 39). Indeed, in 1656, in The Destruction of Troy, his celebrated translation of a large part of the second book of the Aeneid, John Denham had: On the cold earth lies th’unregarded King, A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing. (Davis 2008, 36) Modern popular editions of Dryden’s Aeneid (like Andrews 1968, from which I quoted above) usually omit the marginal note. However, for those – admittedly now very few – readers who are aware of the borrowing, the reference, and, with it, the homage that Dryden pays to Denham, are there. The homage expresses respect and perhaps a degree of affinity. The affinity may well have been political as well as purely translative, but only the latter aspect is of interest to me here. I would like to see it as the thin but visible end of a large wedge. The marginal note obviously highlights an intertextual connection. While it acknowledges Dryden’s inability to improve on Denham in this particular line, it also suggests that, in all the other lines of his Aeneid, Dryden’s approach to translating Virgil differs from Denham’s and leads to different results, beginning with the no more than partial overlap between Denham’s version and his own in the line immediately preceding the verbatim repetition. The homage to Denham occurs in a translation that knows exactly how and where – and, presumably, why – it differs from Denham’s. We can read Dryden’s adoption of Denham’s line as signalling a comment by a translator about translation. It is a comment about the open-ended possibility of and the need for differential renderings, tempered by the occasional admission that a predecessor in this or that instance has hit the nail on the head and

The Translator as Evaluator [2010]  153

may as well be imitated when he or she cannot be emulated. Dryden’s reference to Denham, therefore, concerns the felicity, the appropriateness and, perhaps, the relevance of certain ways of representing Virgil’s Latin in English. To that extent, the verbal echo with which Dryden salutes Denham points well beyond the latter’s achievement toward prevailing ways of rendering, in English or languages like English, Virgil’s Aeneid or texts like it, and perhaps other texts as well. Dryden has read other translations of Virgil besides Denham’s, and he has read translations of other classics; his Aeneid bears the traces of that study. In this way we can reach into the generic, architextual dimension that lies behind the intertextual reference. The move from the intertextual to the architextual allows us to recognise the verbal echo not just as connecting two specific texts but as a translation speaking about translating as such. The echo, that is, amounts to a comment about translation produced in the act of translating. Dryden’s marginal comment identifying the echo makes explicit what is already there in the translation itself, in the very choice of the words that combine into its individual signature – a signature it displays especially effectively at the point where it brushes against Denham’s version. The evidence may be rather less obvious than a direct verbal echo, and we may need more circumstantial data to appreciate its significance. Thomas Hobbes’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey appeared in the 1670s. They were, in George Steiner’s words, ‘the work of a philosopher in his mid-eighties, with no poetic talent’ (1996, 65); Dryden observed, likewise, that Hobbes studied poetry ‘as he did Mathematics, when it was too late’ (Kinley 1958, 1448). Both translations employ rhyme. This does not seem unusual, as every English translator of Homer, from Arthur Hall in the sixteenth century to John Ogilby just ten years before Hobbes, had done so. But by the time Ogilby and Hobbes were translating, something had changed. The English Civil War had happened (1641–1651), and rhyme was no longer what it had been. It had become political. In the preface to Paradise Lost (1668), John Milton, a republican, famously associated rhyme with ‘bondage’ and regarded ‘neglect of rhyme’ as ‘ancient liberty recovered’. Andrew Marvell, another republican, praised Milton’s use of blank verse. Dryden, on the other hand, like Ogilby and Hobbes, was a monarchist and used rhyme; in the essay Of Dramatick Poesie of 1668 he recommended rhyme as the medium for poetry at court and dismissed blank verse as ‘too low for a Poem’. To Milton’s chagrin, Dryden even sought permission to turn Paradise Lost into a rhyming play (Nelson 2008, xxxi–xxxii). In other words, even the apparently innocent and purely literary choice of verse form here signals an added value that invests the translation not just with an emphatic medium but with topical relevance and meaning beyond the representational and translative. Through the use of rhyme versus blank verse, translators position themselves in a political landscape. This positioning takes place irrespective of the role of the translation as re-enactment of its original. Hobbes’s versions of Homer are decidedly unpoetic, not just because Hobbes lacked poetic talent and came to poetry too late in life but also because, as a political philosopher, he was suspicious of poetic ornament and rhetoric, which he

154  Concepts

regarded as obstacles to rational thought. He also consistently portrayed Homer’s heroes as dignified rather than brutish; he tamed Homer’s language and bridled his verse. The translations came out in small, inexpensive, unadorned editions without notes (Nelson 2008, xxxvi–xxxix, lv). In all these ways, the translations manifest an emphatic display of form and style and a wayward relation to existing translations; all these choices reveal the translator’s agenda, which becomes visible in and through all aspects of the text, down to the size and quality of the paper it is printed on. The conclusion must be that, apart from the way a translation speaks about another text by re-enacting or ‘replaying’ it, translation also speaks about itself in the sheer display of its distinctive mode of re-enactment or replay. But the distinctiveness of that mode only shows itself when it is contextualised by means of an intertextual web of contrasts and parallels. The display, as the relief given to a specific mode of representation in the context of past and current alternatives, positions the translator in the translation.

9.2 Reporting Following Relevance theory and a host of other approaches, we can construe translation as a form of reported speech, that is, as a form of quoting.1 Quoting, in turn, can be viewed, with Herbert Clark and Richard Gerrig (1990), as an instance of demonstration, a mimetic re-enactment rather than a diegetic verbal account of an event. The value of Clark and Gerrig, in the context of translation, is twofold. First, they regard translation as a valid instance of quotation and, therefore, of demonstration. Second, they stress that demonstrations are not wholly mimetic but retain a diegetic margin, partly because re-enactments are necessarily selective and partly because they invariably occur in the context of a reporting discourse. Because a reported discourse must be embedded in a reporting clause, the latter frames the words being reported. In the case of translation, the reporting clause can be elaborate and comprise various liminary and other paratexts, from the announcement on a title page that the text which follows is a translation to all manner of translator’s prefaces, footnotes, epilogues and asides. The reporting clause can be minimal, the barest mention of the translator’s name in the colophon of a printed book. It may even have to be inferred on the basis of contextual information leading to the assumption that something is translated. It can be spurious, as in the case of pseudotranslations. If the reporting clause is entirely absent, that is, if there is no detectable trace of one and no reason to infer or suspect one, it does not make much sense to speak of a translation; fully covert translations or cases of undetected plagiarism would be an illustration of this state of affairs. Linguistically, they would represent instances of free direct discourse. Socially and functionally speaking, such texts only become translations when they are unmasked as being translations, even though, genetically, they were translations all along.

The Translator as Evaluator [2010]  155

Reported discourse comes in a range of different types, from direct and free direct discourse to various kinds of indirect discourse. Kristiina TaivalkoskiShilov (2006, 54) has mapped this continuum. It stretches from a paraliptic résumé, in which a translator informs the recipient of the existence of someone else’s words but then omits them, via summary and gist translation, to the kind of indirect and free indirect speech one occasionally hears from amateur interpreters (‘she’s saying her uncle doesn’t live here’), until reaching the direct speech typical of most standard translations. As one moves along this scale, several shifts in the relation between the reporting and the reported speech occur. Indirect discourse means the reported utterance remains syntactically dependent on the reporting discourse (‘He says he can’t make it’), whereas direct discourse is syntactically autonomous and, hence, involves a switch in grammatical person and vantage point from the reporting to the reported speaker (‘He says: “I can’t make it!”’). Direct discourse implies a more mimetic mode of representation of the anterior utterance than indirect discourse, in which the diegetic presence of the reporter remains more in evidence, especially with respect to word choice and register. But it is important to remember that, however mimetic the reported discourse, the translator’s diegetic presence in it is never zero. This is because, first, even verbatim quotation remains selective; second, reported speech, however mimetic, is embedded in a diegetic reporting speech; and third, especially in the case of translation, there must be an agent who is responsible for the choice of manifestly different words in the new language. The translator’s diegetic voice presents, frames and accompanies the mimetic report. Unless we are dealing with completely covert translations or with undetected plagiarism, the re-enunciation of an anterior discourse has to be announced and then performed, even if the announcement is not explicitly stated and needs to be inferred, as is common, for instance, in international news reporting. The point about construing translation as a form of quoting is that, apart from the replay or reporting of another person’s words, this model makes room for the reporting frame, a space in which translators speak in their own name about what it is they are re-enunciating. As speakers who report a pre-existing utterance in another language, translators convey attitudes through and along with the translated discourse they offer up to their readers. The attitudes conveyed are a significant aspect of the social role of translation, as they contribute to affirming, modifying or questioning the values held by the individuals or communities the translator is addressing. This is why it is of methodological importance to devise ways of identifying these attitudes. To my knowledge, at least two conceptual tools are available to assist with this task. One is echoic speech and the other modality.

9.3 Echo Ever since Gutt (1991), it has been possible to view translation as a type of interpretive utterance, Relevance theory’s term for reported discourse. If we want to

156  Concepts

treat the translator’s attitude as part of the reporting, we may view translation more specifically as an instance of what Relevance theory calls echoic speech. An echoic utterance is an interpretive utterance which derives its relevance from the attitude which the speaker signals with regard to the represented discourse.2 The belief which the speaker indicates regarding the represented utterance may be associative or dissociative; in other words, it may be supportive, empathetic and respectful, or it may be disapproving, distancing, sceptical or mocking (Sperber and Wilson 2004, 621–2). The belief or attitude does not have to be linguistically encoded; it may have to be inferred from paralinguistic signals (Noh 2000, 94). When echoic discourse is dissociative, we can speak of irony as Relevance theory understands it. Irony operates when something is said which evokes something else that is left unspoken and a sceptical, mocking or critical attitude is conveyed in the process, for example, if the weather is awful, and someone looks out of the window and exclaims: ‘Beautiful day!’. The difference between the said and the unsaid, and the dissociative attitude attached to this difference, forms an essential part of the ironic utterance. In the case of translation, a preface critical of some or all aspects of an original will mean that the translation itself must be read from a double perspective, with an eye both to what the words ostensibly say and to what needs to be understood additionally as secondary meanings on the basis of the reservations expressed in the preface. A supportive preface, too, resonates within the actual translation. Because the preface frames the translation, it does not directly interfere with its performance but still affects the recipient’s perception of this performance because the evaluative attitude is carried over from the framing to the framed speech. Piling an unspoken discourse on top of a reported discourse means two speaking positions are simultaneously brought into play, one which duly translates and one which communicates its supportive or sceptical or dismissive stance toward the message being translated. The absence of a preface need not mean the absence of an attitude, as the audience is likely to project standard expectations on the translation. Translator irony can work without the explicit distancing signal of a preface. The concluding lines of John Denham’s The Destruction of Troy of 1656, as quoted earlier, can serve as an illustration: ‘On the cold earth lies th’unregarded King,/ A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing’. The words achieve more than their status as a discourse representing Virgil’s Latin. They can be read both as a plain translation and as a political statement, but in this latter case, they amount to a veiled comment made from a relatively safe position because it would allow the translator to deny, if the need arose, that anything more than a plain translation was intended. As Paul Davis (2008) and others have pointed out, the episode describing Priam’s dead body was not there in Denham’s 1636 manuscript of his translation. We cannot be certain that the lines reflect Denham’s horror at the execution of Charles I in 1648, but it is generally assumed that they do, especially as, in the 1656 version, these are the concluding lines of the poem, which now ends on a stark note of desacralisation (Davis 2008, 36). The presence of a poignant image that leaves the poem suspended is a matter of display, and fuels

The Translator as Evaluator [2010]  157

interpretive speculation. Whether Denham intended to do more than merely translate Virgil’s lines is not the issue. Irony can be in the eye of the beholder; it does not depend exclusively on the speaker’s intention. That is what enables modern critics to speculate that, in these lines, Denham was saying more than he was saying and that contemporary readers may well have interpreted the lines in this way. The point is not so much the fact that Denham makes a political statement, but that, in translating, he appears to be commenting also on the potential of Virgil’s Latin to be relevant to the translator’s place and time. The comment is less than explicit, for good political reasons, given Denham’s circumstances at the time. It is precisely the echoic nature of translation that allows someone like Denham to exploit the ambiguity of saying one thing and leaving the reader guessing whether more is being implied.

9.4 Modulation Reported speech is necessarily echoic to some extent, however small. There cannot be a total absence of attitude in a reporting speaker and, by implication, in a translator. The attitude can be indifferent or neutral, even though the decision to be neutral is not itself a neutral decision and conveys an evaluative attitude toward the attitude that is being adopted. Linguistically, the expression of an attitude concerning the propositions one is uttering is ranged under modality. Modality covers what M.A.K. Halliday calls the interpersonal metafunction of language; it is the component that ‘represents the speaker’s intrusion into the speech situation’ by expressing the speaker’s attitudes, judgements and expectations (Halliday 2002, 199); in so doing, it defines the role speakers assign to themselves as well as the role they assign to the audience that is being addressed. In other words, apart from signalling a speaker’s perspective on the communicative exchange, modality also assigns and acts out social roles (Halliday 2002, 206). It has become standard to distinguish, with Paul Simpson (1993, 47–8), three kinds of modality: deontic, boulomaic and epistemic. Epistemic modality expresses the speaker’s relative certainty regarding the truth or probability of the proposition being uttered and need not concern us here. Deontic and boulomaic modality are, however, of relevance. They are closely related: whereas deontic modality expresses obligation, boulomaic modality expresses inclination. Halliday uses a slightly different terminology from Simpson. He speaks of ‘modalisation’ where Simpson sees epistemic modality, and groups under ‘modulation’ the two kinds that Simpson distinguishes as deontic and boulomaic modality (Halliday 1994, 356–8). However, within ‘modulation’, Halliday makes a distinction between active and passive modulation. The former refers to an ability or willingness presented as intrinsic to the actor, and the latter indicates a compulsion or permission extrinsic to the actor (Halliday 1970, 341). Halliday’s active modulation corresponds to Simpson’s boulomaic modality, and passive modulation resembles deontic modality. Terminology aside, the distinction itself

158  Concepts

is of relevance to the study of translation. In the one case, translators may build a rapport with their audience by signalling a personal commitment or desire to translate in a certain way, or with certain personal enthusiasms or reservations, or to offer a certain text in translation in the first place; in the other case, translators may appeal to a shared understanding of the nature of translation or the translator’s responsibility. Examples of both types of modality are not hard to find. The late-medieval translator of Der vrouwen heimelijcheit (The hidden secret of women), a gynaecological tract translated into Dutch via French from a Latin source in the fourteenth century, explains in his prefatory verses that he has omitted a good part of the section on terminating unwanted pregnancies because abortion is a sin, but, he adds, he did not want to omit the offending section entirely because he worried that he might be accused of being an incompetent or ignorant translator: ‘Yet I have disclosed it somewhat / So nobody will be able to say / I do not know or understand it.’ (‘Doch hebbics wat ontbonden,/ Dat niemen en derf orconden / Dat ics niet en versta no ne weet’; Besamusca and Sonnemans 1999, 90). The statement shows a dual and contradictory pull, with both a moral and a professional aspect. The moral no (do not disseminate knowledge about sinful practices) meets a professional yes (translate accurately and in full), and the result is a compromise (translate but abridge troubling passages). I am inclined to read the translator’s statement as expressing, in Halliday’s terms, active modulation, in that it presents the translator’s stance as resulting from his own decision and inclination, without invoking an extrinsic power that obliges him to act as he does. In this sense, Halliday is right to stress that modality defines both the speaker and the speaker’s perception of the audience. As regards the actual translation, the reader who goes on to peruse the text will need to bear in mind that the section on terminating unwanted pregnancies carries the translator’s disapproving judgement in its every word. This is what makes the translation, in Relevance theory terms, ironic. The translator is giving us the gist of the original but is, at the same time, signalling moral reservations about what it says. His diegetic presence in the mimetic representation stems from the fact that we know we are being presented with an abridged version, and we know the considerations that led to the abridgement. Both as regards his moral scruple and his perception of his professional task, the translator is aware of the values that are alive among his audience, and his positioning helps to secure the values he shares with them. At the same time, he asks for his audience’s understanding of his predicament as a translator, and their appreciation of his problem will affect their reading of the translation. In all these ways, the translator’s positioning is a matter of appraisal (Hunston and Thompson 2000; Martin and White 2005). He evaluates the discourse being translated and his own responsibility toward it. This evaluation reverberates through the translation and builds a rapport with the audience.

The Translator as Evaluator [2010]  159

Thomas Carlyle, in the preface to his 1824 English translation of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister, observes: to follow the original in all the variations of its style, has been my constant endeavour. In many points, both literary and moral, I could have wished devoutly that he had not written as he has done, but to alter anything was not in my commission. Just two sentences later, however, he adds: ‘Accordingly, except a few phrases and sentences, not in all amounting to a page, which I have dropped as evidently unfit for the English taste, I have studied to present the work exactly as it stands in German’ (Frank 2007, 1572). Here, the translator claims he let his professional instinct prevail over his stylistic and moral misgivings (‘to alter anything was not in my commission’), but he has, nevertheless, omitted the odd passage deemed ‘unfit for the English taste’. The reference to the translator’s commission characterises Carlyle’s stance as one of passive modulation, even though his interpretation of it (how much or how little modulation and what kind) may be a matter of a historical translation poetics. The translator anticipates the audience’s approval of his decision to cut the original here and there and, to that extent, he appeals to shared values. A faint whiff of irony will hang over the actual translation because the reader will have to guess exactly where Carlyle decided to drop or alter something, and where he says one thing when something else, presumably something less tasteful could have been said in its place. Here, too, both the preface and the actual translation engage in social bonding by seeking to secure shared values recognised as ‘our’ values, in contrast with foreign mores. In addition, an allegedly common notion of what translation entails is being perpetuated by means of both statement and performance. Let me end with an altogether different example, which stretches some of the points I have been making as far as they will go. The Dutch poet J.J.L. ten Kate (1819–89) was a prolific and eagerly ‘Christianising’ translator in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He translated almost exclusively religious authors, and he occasionally doctored them to intensify their Christian message even further. He was aware of the new scientific ideas about geological ‘deep time’ and about evolution theory that were causing international controversy at the time (as early as the 1830s, the geologist Charles Lyell had suggested that the earth was not thousands but millions of years old; Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared in 1859). Ten Kate’s own epic poem, The Creation (De schepping, 1866), sought to reconcile those revolutionary ideas with the biblical creation story and came down firmly on the side of what we now call creationism. The poem presented the seven biblical days of creation as corresponding to successive geological periods and argued, in a seven-page footnote, that science and the Bible concurred in dating the first emergence of human beings as having happened around 6,000 years ago (Ten Kate 1866, 307–13).

160  Concepts

Not all the scientists agreed. In an article published in a general periodical a year after Ten Kate’s poem, the Dutch palaeontologist T.C. Winkler (1822–79) dismissed The Creation as ‘stupid’ and ‘a slap in the face of science’ (Winkler 1867, 45, 25; Hegeman 1970, 279). Winkler, trained as a medical doctor and the curator of a geological and palaeontological museum, took a very different view of the earth’s history. A few years earlier, on 7 July 1861, Winkler had sent a copy of one of his own articles, on fish fossils, to Darwin, together with his Dutch translation of The Origin of Species. In the covering letter, written in French, Winkler explained that the gift was a token of his great respect for Darwin’s scientific endeavour (‘ je désire vivement vous témoigner […] le respect que m’inspirent vos travaux scientifiques’, Winkler 1861). Winkler wrote appreciatively about Darwin in cultural journals, and he translated scientists other than Darwin as well, including the geologists Charles Lyell (Principles of Geology, 1830) and David Page (Philosophy of Geology, 1864). In this way, he was affiliated with Dutch scientist-translators such as Herman Hartogh Heijs van Zouteveen (1808–78), who translated most of Darwin’s other works, including a version of The Descent of Man, which appeared simultaneously with the English original in 1872 (Van Baren 1912, 1924; Hegeman 1970). Both Ten Kate and Winkler translated writers they sympathised with, and they both wrote and translated against each other. They clashed directly just once, in the few brief words quoted above, not over translation but over Ten Kate’s creation poem and its Christian fundamentalism. But even though Ten Kate’s numerous renderings of Christian authors and Winkler’s translations of scientists such as Darwin, Lyell and Page have no immediate point of contact, we can read each translator’s choice of what and how to translate and, consequently, each translator’s entire career, as pitched against the choices made by the other. Each translator expressed affinity with the authors they translated, and, through their translations, they strengthened the body of ideas they identified with. They almost certainly acted out of a combination of personal conviction and a sense of professional duty, collapsing Halliday’s active and passive modulation into one. But the modality underpinning their work is obvious; it involves inclination and obligation, and a pervasive epistemic doubt about the ideas being propagated through the other’s translations. They found themselves in opposite camps in a battle of ideas. Each man’s sympathy for one side meant scepticism or hostility toward the other side, and each one of their translation choices bears this out. The values they sought to secure through their translations point well beyond the world of translation to one of the defining intellectual conflicts of the age: the clash between religion and science. But this very much larger stake only becomes visible when we have a way of revealing the translator’s agenda, that is, when we can distinguish between the mimetic nature of translation and the evaluative attitude, or modality, that informs it.

The Translator as Evaluator [2010]  161

Notes 1 It may well be that casting translation as a form of reported discourse, and developing that idea with reference to particular characteristics of reported discourse, is language-specific, in that distinctions and inferences are being made which assume the structure of English or a similar language. I am not in a position to gauge how different the picture might look when viewed through radically different languages. With thanks to Hans Vermeer, who reminded me of this limitation of the model. 2 Let me take this opportunity to correct an error in my Conference of the Tongues (Hermans 2007). An echoic utterance is an interpretive utterance which conveys an attitude, but this attitude is not necessarily dissociative. In my book, I suggested that it was (2007, 77). Fortunately, the error does not affect the argument in the book. Ironic speech, which the relevant chapter is concerned with, is that variety of echoic speech which conveys a dissociative attitude toward the speech being echoed. With thanks to Xosé Rosales Sequeiros, who pointed out the error within days of the book appearing in print.

Bibliography Andrews, Clarence, ed. 1968. Virgil’s Aeneid. Translated by John Dryden. New York: Airmont. Besamusca, Bart and Gerard Sonnemans, ed. 1999. De crumen diet volc niet eten en mochte. Nederlandse beschouwingen over vertalen tot 1550. The Hague: Stichting Bibliographia Neerlandica. Clark, Herbert and Richard Gerrig. 1990. ‘Quotations as Demonstrations’. Language 66, 764–805. Davis, Paul. 2008. Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646–1726. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frank, Armin Paul. 2007. ‘Main Concepts of Translating: Transformations during the Enlightenment and Romantic Periods in France, Great Britain and the German Countries’. In Übersetzung. Translation. Traduction. An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, vol. 2, edited by Harald Kittel, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert and Fritz Paul, 1531–609. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Gutt, Ernst-August. 1991. Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context. Oxford: Blackwell. Halliday, M.A.K. 1970. ‘Functional Diversity in Language, as Seen from a Consideration of Modality and Mood in English’. Foundations of Language 6(3), 322–61. Halliday, M.A.K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2nd ed. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K. 2002. On Grammar. London & New York: Continuum. Hegeman, J.G. 1970. ‘Darwin en onze voorouders. Nederlandse reacties op de evolutieleer 1860–75, een terreinverkenning’. Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 85, 261–314. Hermans, Theo. 2007. The Conference of the Tongues. Manchester: St Jerome. Hunston, Susan and Geoff Thompson, ed. 2000. Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kinley, James, ed. 1958. The Poems of John Dryden. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, James and Peter White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke & New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

162  Concepts

Nelson, Eric, ed. 2008. Thomas Hobbes: Translations of Homer. Oxford: Clarendon. Noh, Eun-Ju. 2000. Metarepresentation: A Relevance-Theory Approach. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pym, Anthony. 1992. Translation and Text Transfer: An Essay on the Principles of Intercultural Communication. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Simpson, Paul. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View. London & New York: Routledge. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 2004. ‘Relevance Theory’. In The Handbook of Pragmatics, edited by Laurence Horn and Gregory Ward, 607–32. Oxford: Blackwell. Steiner, George, ed. 1996. Homer in English. London: Penguin. Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina. 2006. La tierce main. Le discours rapporté dans les traductions françaises de Fielding au XVIIIe siècle. Arras: Artois Presses Université. Ten Kate, J.J.L. 1866. De schepping. Utrecht: Kemink. Van Baren, J. 1912. ‘Hartogh Heijs van Zouteveen, Hermanus’. In Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, vol. 2, edited by P.C. Molhuysen and P.J. Blok, 545–7. Leiden: Sijthoff. Van Baren, J. 1924. ‘Winkler, T.C.’. In Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, vol. 6, edited by P.C. Molhuysen, P.J. Blok and K.H. Kossmann, 1313–4. Leiden: Sijthoff. Wadensjö, Cecilia. 1998. Interpreting as Interaction. London & New York: Longman. Winkler, T.C. 1861. Letter 3202 [to Charles Darwin]. Accessed June 10, 2009. http:// www​.darwinproject​.ac​.uk​/darwinletters​/calendar​/entry​-3202​.html. Winkler, T.C. 1867. ‘De leer van Darwin’. De Gids 31 (4), 22–70.

10 POSITIONING TRANSLATORS Voices, Views and Values in Translation [2014]

10.1 Self and Distance Shortly after the end of Apartheid in South Africa in 1994, the newly elected government there set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an effort to come to terms with the country’s recent past. Chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Commission heard testimonies from both victims and perpetrators of violence during the Apartheid era. In her book Country of My Skull (1999), the South African poet and journalist Antjie Krog offers an account of these hearings. At one point, she describes a young Tswana interpreter who, after months of listening to and interpreting first-hand statements of brutality and torture, needed counselling and was advised to take a break. He ignored the advice because, as he put it in an interview: ‘This is my history, and I want to be part of it – until the end’ (Krog 1999, 195). The reason why his work as an interpreter left him traumatised was the use of the first person. ‘It is difficult to interpret victim hearings’, he told his interviewer, ‘because you use the first person all the time. I have no distance when I say “I” […] it runs through me with I’ (Krog 1999, 195). The Tswana interpreter was evidently inexperienced. Normally, court interpreters are trained to separate their reporting of what their clients say from their own judgements and opinions about what is being said. When they voice a client’s words, the first person they use does not refer to them but to the client whose words they are interpreting. Professional interpreters are meant to identify with the client’s perspective as part of the interpreting performance but otherwise to remain emotionally and judgementally detached from that discourse, neutralising their own views and subject position during the staging of their client’s voice. In the special circumstances of 1990s South Africa and given both the harrowing nature of the testimonies and the scarcity of professional interpreters DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-13

164  Concepts

to cover the relevant languages in this particular case, the young Tswana interpreter did the best he could. During his interpreting performance, he just about succeeded in keeping his reporting separate from his feelings of empathy with the victims, but at a high personal cost. The very fact, however, that it takes a conscious act and professional training to manage the separation of the interpreter’s two selves – the reporting self and the judging and feeling self – means both are integral to the interpreting process. At issue in what follows is the relation between the two. I will argue that written translation is not fundamentally different from oral interpreting in this respect, that all translating can be seen to have the translator’s subject position inscribed in it, and that the recognition of this state of affairs has ethical and other consequences. Because the translator’s subject position is continually being constructed as the discourse unfolds, I prefer to speak of ‘positioning’. As part of my argument, I will present a model of translation as reported speech that is able to account for the translator’s positioning, and I will stress the recipient’s role in discerning it.

10.2 Framing and Code-Switching Most oral interpreting is characterised by the physical presence of two speakers simultaneously, and each can be heard. They may take turns to speak, or one speaker’s voice may be foregrounded for a time, but the distinct voices can usually be told apart. Written translation tends to be different in this respect. Here, as a rule, the reader has access to just one text, the translation. The fact that this text is identified as a translation implies that there is also an original which exists elsewhere in another language, but, more often than not, the original remains out of sight and out of reach. The large majority of translations are made for readers who do not have access, or have no easy access, to the original, and as a result, translations and originals tend to circulate independently of each other. In addition, whereas interpreters may, consciously or not, signal their personal involvement in what is being said through paralingual means, such as voice timbre or body language (professional practice frowns on this), written texts have only words on the page to indicate the speaker’s views. It is precisely in this respect that the conventions of translation make it hard to detect in the translation itself how translators have personally engaged with the texts they are presenting. From the moment the reader enters the translated text, the ‘I’ that speaks is not the ‘I’ of the translator but that of the original speaker. The reader is likely to be aware that a text identified as a translation implies the manual intervention of a translator at some prior stage and that the words they read in a language they recognise must have been selected by the translator, but, in accordance with copyright law, the work, as such, remains the original author’s, and it is the author who speaks in the text. The rest is a matter of paratexts and of context. Even though it may be the translator who presents the foreign-language work to a new audience in their own tongue, the threshold between the translator’s gesture in offering the work and the performance of

Positioning Translators  165

translation in the actual text is marked by a shift known as ‘first-person displacement’ (Pym 2004, 8). Within a translation, translators do not speak in their own name. Yet, if Roger Fowler’s observation, decades ago, that language ‘does not allow us to “say something” without conveying an attitude to that something’ (Fowler 1977, 76) is correct, how can we account, in translated texts, for the attitudes of translators when we know they are responsible for assembling the words we read on the page but their agency as speakers, their discursive presence, is subsumed under that of the original author? Put differently, how do translators signal attitudes, subject positions, opinions and value judgements in the translations they produce? Can they avoid doing so, if using language means conveying an attitude? And how can we, as receivers, register their positionings? In one sense, the matter is straightforward. We can look for visible traces and direct interventions. English renderings of, say, Martin Heidegger or Jacques Derrida regularly insert German or French words between brackets to supplement the translations offered in an effort to indicate that the originals contain some untranslatable aspect which, it is hoped, can be shown by exhibiting the original item. Translator’s notes, especially when they are identified as such, are even more obviously paratextual in nature. The footnote ‘en français dans le texte’ in a French translation tells its readers that the original, which was not in French, contained some French words, but it is also likely to baffle readers because all the words they are reading are already in French. It is certainly possible to explore such things as culture-bound references and instances of linguistic self-reference in translations of works of fiction and other genres to see translators stepping out of the shadows and offering marginal comments to elucidate problematic aspects of the texts they are presenting (Hermans 1996). These paratextual interventions are frequently metatranslational in nature, reflecting on the problems of translation in the texts in question. There are other ways to approach the issue: by focusing less on formal translatorial intrusions and more on the translator’s role in mediating the values inscribed in the translation to its prospective readers. This is the avenue I want to explore here. Let me begin with some crude examples in which value conflicts are at stake; they are strongly marked, and framing is everything. In 1604, the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) published a short Latin treatise on miracles that had allegedly occurred as pilgrims venerated a statue of the Virgin Mary in the church of Halle, a small town near Brussels. The book, Diva Virgo Hallensis (Lipsius 1604), consisted of a series of narratives exemplifying miraculous healings and recoveries and formed part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation propaganda war against Protestant heresies. Lipsius himself, an international celebrity on account of his classical scholarship, had at some time in his life harboured Calvinist sympathies, having taught for 13 years at the staunchly Calvinist University of Leyden in the northern Netherlands then known as the Dutch Republic, but he had eventually returned to the Catholic fold and the University of Louvain in the southern, Spanish Netherlands. A Dutch translation of Diva Virgo Hallensis came out in Delft in 1605. Delft was in the Calvinist-dominated Dutch Republic, then still at war with the Catholic

166  Concepts

Spanish Netherlands. The translation, by one Albert van Oosterwijck, was generally accurate enough. The venom was in the translator’s introduction and epilogue, and in the copious marginal annotations stalking the translation. They depicted Lipsius as an opportunist and a turncoat and ridiculed the pope, the Catholic Church and all belief in miracles. Two years later, another Dutch version appeared, this time in Brussels. It was the handiwork of Philips Numan, who had himself, in 1604, in both Dutch and French, compiled an account of miracles attributed to the Virgin Mary in another small Flemish town, an account which Lipsius had put into Latin at the request of the bishop of Antwerp. Numan’s translation (Lipsius 1607) did not differ substantially from Van Oosterwijck’s, and it came without annotations (bar one), but it did feature an extensive introduction in which Numan railed against Van Oosterwijck. Numan clearly aligned himself with Lipsius and the Catholic Church and opposed what he must have regarded as the blasphemous version cooked up in Delft. Here is the opening sentence of the main body of the text, first in Lipsius’s Latin, followed by Van Oosterwijck’s and then Numan’s versions: A primâ adolescentiâ DIVAE VIRGINIS amorem and cultum indui, eamque patronam mihi and ducem in periculis, in molestiis, in omni vitae cursu, elegi. (Lipsius 1604, 1) (From my earliest childhood, I cultivated my devotion to and the service of the Blessed Virgin, and I chose her as my protectress and guide in dangers, in hard times and in the whole course of my life.) Van mijnder eerster jeucht aen hebbe ick de liefde ende dienst der Heyliger Maget begeerlijck aenghenomen /ende hebbe haer my tot een voorstandersse ende geleydersse in periculen / in moeyten / inden ghantschen loop mijns levens / vercoren. (Lipsius 1605, 5) (From my first youth, I eagerly cultivated my devotion to and the service of the Blessed Virgin and chose her to be my advocate and guide in dangers, in difficulties, in the whole course of my life.) Van mynen jonghen daghen ende jeucht heb ick aenghenomen die liefde ende dienst der heyligher Maecht / ende heb deselve vercoren tot een beschermstere ende leytsvrouwe in allen peryckelen / swaericheden ende inden gantschen loop myns levens. (Lipsius 1607, 1) (From my youthful days and childhood, I cultivated my devotion to and the service of the Blessed Virgin and chose her to be my protectress and guide in all dangers and difficulties and in the whole course of my life.) The two Dutch versions barely differ; if anything, Van Oosterwijck is the more literal of the two. Yet the ideological distance between them is immense, and

Positioning Translators  167

this is entirely due to the way they are framed. In addition to translating, Van Oosterwijck inserts a sarcastic marginal note at the end of the sentence which makes the ideological distance between author and translator abundantly clear. Lipsius declares himself to have been a loyal servant of the Blessed Virgin all his life, but the translator’s note undermines Lipsius’ credibility by recalling the time he spent among the Calvinists in the northern Netherlands: Oock doens ghy saet onder den predicstoel te Leyden: hielpt de Kerckenordeninghe maecken inden Hage. (Lipsius, 1605, 5) (Even when you sat under the pulpit at Leyden and assisted in drafting the church ordinance in The Hague.) In the note, Van Oosterwijck speaks in his own name, addressing Lipsius in the second person, in the margin of a translation which shows the translator’s first-person displacement at work (‘From my first youth, I eagerly cultivated…’). In dramatising the two contrasting speaking positions by putting them in such close proximity, Van Oosterwijck ensures that his hostile frame pervades the actual translation. The translator stages the author’s voice, but the ideological gap between author and translator which the frame has opened up makes that staging double-edged. Van Oosterwijck writes Lipsius’s words for him in Dutch, but he does not underwrite them. The author is made to speak in order to be mocked and baited. In narratological terms, the passage is voiced by and focalised through the autobiographical subject Lipsius, but the translator’s framing has overlaid the scene with a film of irony that discredits the narrator by rendering him unreliable. Although the translated text itself shows no visible sign of it, we know that another subject position has come into play, one that is at variance with that of the ostensible speaking subject. Van Oosterwijck’s montage frames Lipsius in more senses than one. Numan’s translation, by contrast, remains loyal to Lipsius and is explicitly directed against Van Oosterwijck. If, in Van Oosterwijck’s version, we needed to distinguish Lipsius’s speaking ‘I’ from the hostile translator looming behind it, Numan is happy to put the standard translator’s first-person displacement fully into effect and to let Lipsius talk unhindered. Instead, the framing of his translation is designed to mark its hostility to Van Oosterwijck’s version. Numan’s lengthy introduction quotes Van Oosterwijck sufficiently for even a reader who does not have access to the latter’s translation to gain a good idea of what Numan evidently regards as its blasphemous nature. Reading Numan’s own translation with that frame in mind, the rendering he offers becomes not only a corrective to Van Oosterwijck’s, but it also makes an emphatic claim to authenticity as an undistorted representation of the Latin and as affirming the truth of the miracles contained in Lipsius’s account. The claim is addressed to a reader who sympathises with the Catholic camp, for Numan’s introduction is clearly aimed at a Catholic readership and anticipates their approval.

168  Concepts

The positioning discernible in Numan’s translation, then, is characterised by ideological agreement with Lipsius and animosity toward Van Oosterwijck. Their respective versions, and especially the manner of their packaging, reflect the different ways they read Lipsius. In terms of the various types of reading distinguished by James Martin and Peter White in The Language of Evaluation, we can say that, whereas Van Oosterwijck deploys a resistant reading of Lipsius in refusing to accommodate the position naturalised by the Latin original, Numan evidences a compliant reading of Lipsius but resists Van Oosterwijck. My own reading of both is tactical in that I deploy them for purposes other than those naturalised in them (Martin and White 2005, 206–7; Munday 2012, 38–9). The two contrasting translations of Lipsius’s treatise on the Virgin’s miracles at Halle can stand for numerous other cases of translators aligning themselves with or against certain authors or fellow translators. The alignment may concern matters of ideology, religion, aesthetics and everything in between. It may affect certain aspects of a particular work or writer, or an oeuvre in its entirety. Examples could be drawn from a range of periods and text types, from neo-classical literary translations that routinely seek to improve the aesthetic and moral qualities of their foreign originals to pro- and anti-Nazi versions of Mein Kampf. Rather more complex sets of relationships than those shown in the case of Lipsius and his two translators may be established. When the otherwise unremarkable Samuel Dunster translated the satires and epistles of Horace into English in 1709, he offered a prose version as ‘a due Medium between a Paraphrase and a Verbal Translation’, adding, in another echo of John Dryden, that a translator should ‘consider himself as a Labourer in another Man’s Vineyard’. A verse rendering, he argued, required the translator to cut corners for the sake of metre and rhyme, as was only ‘too apparent in Mr Creech’s Performance […] but more especially in our modern Imitations’ (Dunster 1729, no page). Regarding the sexual and other improprieties in Horace’s poems, Dunster stood equally firm: I have castrated our Poet, in translating nothing that bordered on Obscenity, or that was contrary to the Rules of Decency and good Manners; insomuch that the most modest Person may now safely read his Satires and Epistles, and not run the Risk of endangering his Virtue. (Dunster 1729, no page.) To quote just a single snippet from the actual translation: when in Satires I, vii, lines 30–31, a Persian merchant is called a cuckold (viator […] magna compellans voce cucullum), which, in Alexander Brome’s anthology of 1666, had been rendered as ‘and the smart Persian Rogue and Cuckold calls’, Dunster tones the phrase down to ‘call’d the Merchant all the bitter names he could invent, right or wrong’ (Brome 1680, 230; Dunster 1729, 84–5). Even in this small compass Dunster’s paratext sets up a network of intertextual filiations involving Dryden, a host of verse translators from the Classics, including Thomas Creech (who had translated Horace in verse in 1684), and a

Positioning Translators  169

whole discourse on decorum in polite society. The frame then interacts with the translation, for its prose has now become a deliberate choice, and whenever the poems contain even a hint of rudeness or sexual innuendo, the sheer blandness of Dunster’s phrasing may be suspected of papering over a stronger expression. In this sense, the form itself of Dunster’s version as well as his choice of words in certain passages betray a positioning which is at once aesthetic and ideological, reflecting the translator’s attitudes toward both the original author and earlier translators. The examples mentioned so far were concerned with translators establishing a paratextual frame which then seeps into the translated text and there destabilises the apparent neatness of translation’s first-person displacement. The following case combines framing with code-switching. In 1939, Clement Egerton translated the seventeenth-century Chinese erotic novel Jin Ping Mei as The Golden Lotus. In his brief foreword the translator stressed that every realistic detail in the novel was essential to its merciless depiction of corrupt officialdom and that, despite the frequently embarrassing lack of reticence, ‘I felt that, if the book was to be produced at all, it must be produced in its entirety’ (Egerton 1954, vol. 1, vi). However, he went on, ‘it could not all go into English, and the reader will therefore be exasperated to find occasional long passages in Latin. I am sorry about these, but there was nothing else to do’ (ibid.). And, indeed, quite a number of passages in the translation suddenly switch from English to Latin and back again, sometimes even in mid-sentence, as in this scene: When the maid had gone, Hsi-men lay down on the bed, braccas detraxit, extulit penem quem iussit mulierem in ore capere dum ipse vino fruitur. ‘Suge istum mihi bene’, inquit, ‘et pictam stolam tibi dabo quem die festo induas’. ‘Sane’, respondit mulier, ‘etiam atque etiam sugere volo’. ‘My child’, Hsi-men Ch’ing said, ‘I should like to burn some incense on your body’. ‘Do what you like’, the woman said. Hsi-men made fast the door, tum stolam et bracas detraxit. In lecto mulier iacebat, et Hsi-men a sinu tres murrae particulas vino madefactas cepit quas ex illo tempore habuerat cum domina Lin sibi placuisset. Vestem mulieris detraxit et murrae aliam particulam supra pectus, aliam supra ventrem, aliam supra cunnum posuit. Tum omnes simul incendit. (Egerton 1954, vol. 4, 59) The novel has evidently been translated ‘in its entirety’, but not every sentence is meant to be intelligible to the average Anglophone reader. In this sense the use of the technique is different from, say, the French dialogues in Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the occasional insertion of foreign words or phrases

170  Concepts

to evoke cultural specificity in some postcolonial or migrant fiction. The codeswitching in Egerton’s case serves to screen a scene from view and acts as an index of moral censure. It would be effective even without the translator’s paratext, as the device had a long history: it was common practice, for instance, in nineteenth-century translations of the Thousand and One Nights or Boccaccio’s Decameron. It guarantees the integrity of a complete translation while reserving some passages for the exclusive delectation of a cultural elite presumed to be morally as well as intellectually robust. The translator’s positioning shows in the selection of passages to be veiled and the foreign language chosen for these passages. Although, strictly speaking, we cannot be sure that these choices stem from the translator and not from a narrator, the availability of other translations claiming to be the same work while showing different choices makes this a reasonable assumption.

10.3 Discordant Narration, Discordant Translation All the translators reviewed so far (with the exception of Philips Numan) harboured reservations of one kind or another about the texts they were offering in translation (Numan’s reservations targeted another translation). In each case, throughout the work in question or for part of it, the translators made their authors speak in a new language while ensuring that their ideological, moral and other strictures about what the authors were saying were conveyed to the reader. The translations themselves practised the first-person displacement typical of translation but muddled its grammatical clarity by using framing and codeswitching to insinuate unstated meanings into the performance of translation. There is a certain similarity between these techniques and what Dorrit Cohn (2000) describes as discordant narration. A discordant narrator is a fictional figure who tells a story that is morally or ideologically so gross, or told so crassly, that the reader eventually realises that the author who created the figure in fact holds views that are opposed to those the narrator asserts. To enable this realisation, the author signals to the reader that the narrative is to be understood differently from the way the narrator understands it (Cohn 2000, 307). The signalling may take various forms, such as exaggeration or the narrator’s adherence to standards regarded as repugnant or outrageous by prevailing moral norms shared between authors and their readership. To grasp narratives of this kind, audiences have to read the narrator’s account against the grain and remain alert to the alternative values which the author holds aloft behind the narrator’s back, as it were. The structural parallel between discordant narration and, say, Van Oosterwijck’s staging of Lipsius or Egerton’s treatment of objectionable passages in The Golden Lotus will be clear. There is also an obvious difference. In discordant narration, the author’s voice is not heard directly at all; the authorial stance is ironic and has to be inferred by the reader. The examples of discordant translation reviewed above featured framing and code-switching devices by means of which the translators signalled the discrepancy between their own

Positioning Translators  171

views and those in the texts under translation. The difference, however, is there only in the degree of explicitness. Egerton’s code-switching would have been effective in the absence of the translator’s foreword because the device itself had a long history of signalling disapproval or discretion. Dunster’s statement about castrating Horace is unspecific, and the reader has to guess which suspiciously inoffensive passages in his translation might serve to suppress more strongly worded alternatives. There is something else – an unintended consequence of appropriating a theoretical model. In discordant narration, the author fields a narrator who voices the opinions and value judgements that we read on the page. Applied to discordant translation, this model casts the original author in the role of narrator, that is, the speaker whose words, perhaps filtered through further, lower order narrators, come to us as readers. The translator then appears as the behind-the-scenes authorial presence that allows, or enables, another voice, the original author’s, to speak in its own name. This would seem to invert the usual hierarchy between author and translator. It also makes it hard to see the translator as merely another narrator. The issue is of some import because it brings into view the kind of communicative situation that translation typically establishes. If discordant translation has the structure of discordant narration, it is the translator who communicates with an audience. The translator, as an authorial presence, lets the original author speak in his or her own name. First-person displacement sees to it that, when the original author is speaking, the translator remains out of sight and out of earshot. As we saw above, however, this does not prevent translators from imparting to their audiences their opinions and judgements about the views being aired by the original author. As far as translation is concerned, this communicative model is not exclusive to discordant translation. It is, in essence, the model of reported speech and, prototypically, of direct quotation. If we go down this path and model translation as reported discourse, we will find that discordant translation is merely a special case and that we can discern translators’ value judgements in all translating. This will afford the conclusion that translation matters as a social and cultural practice not so much because it supplies reproductions of anterior discourses in other tongues, but because it negotiates and takes a stance toward the values it transmits.

10.4 Reported Discourse and Ironic Speech Viewing translation as reported speech means inverting the conventional perception of an author speaking through a translator. This standard perception, sanctioned by copyright law which asserts the original author’s undiminished right to be regarded as the author of any translation of his or her work, reduces translation to reproduction. If we recognise, however, that translation involves not merely rewording a pre-existing discourse but relocating it and redirecting

172  Concepts

it to suit a new environment and a new audience, the agent of this reorientation gains prominence. This approach permits the claim that, when we are dealing with translations, the overarching communication that takes place consists in a translator addressing an audience by promising the performance of translation and then, as part of this discourse and, therefore, embedded in it, proceeding to quote the original across the relevant languages. The translator lets the heterolingual author speak in a tongue the audience can understand. In this view, at least two simultaneous utterances reach the audience. One is the translator’s statement offering a translation. The other is the quoted discourse. Because the latter is an inset in the former, it is bound to be affected by the frame surrounding it, even if that frame consists of no more than the label ‘translation’ on the title page of a book. The audience can process the quoted discourse as the original author’s words mouthed by the translator as intermediary or proxy, or it can concentrate on the overarching discourse; it can also do both at the same time and engage in deictic shifts, changing the focus of their orientation by moving from one level to another. A convenient starting point for construing translation as reported speech is the essay ‘Quotations as Demonstrations’ by Herbert Clark and Richard Gerrig (1990). If demonstrations constitute mimetic enactments rather than diegetic accounts of anterior actions, then quotations, Clark and Gerrig argue, can be understood as demonstrations, in that they depict rather than describe preexisting utterances (1990, 774). Quotations, however, are not wholly mimetic representations. Apart from the fact that spoken quotations are selective in that they only rarely manage to reproduce fully such aspects as timbre, pitch, accent and rhythm of the quoted utterance, even verbatim written quotation contains a diegetic element absent from the original. This is because quotations are simulated utterances embedded in the reporting discourse and, as Meir Sternberg has noted, the embedding itself not only recontextualises the quoted words but lets them appear under a certain light and, thus, puts them in a certain perspective (1982, 108, 130, 133). Quotations appear, prototypically, as direct speech, but, in principle, the whole range of forms of reported discourse is available. When a quotation appears as direct speech, the quoted words constitute an autonomous syntactic unit within the reporting speech, whereas indirect speech remains syntactically subordinated to the main clause. Indirect speech may be more mimetic or less, depending on whether the reported utterance is focalised through the original speaker or through the reporter. Sternberg quotes from Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit: ‘Mr Bailey modestly replied that he hoped he knowed wot o’clock it wos in general’ (Sternberg 1982, 115). Whereas mimetic indirect discourse imitates the original speaker’s choice of words and manner of speaking, more diegetic forms of indirect reporting reflect the reporter’s vocabulary, register and vantage point and, thus, tend toward description rather than depiction. A crucial feature of Clark and Gerrig’s approach to quotations is that, because quotations are not restricted to verbatim repetitions, the authors also admit

Positioning Translators  173

translations as quotations. In contrast with, for example, Nelson Goodman, for whom only verbatim repetition qualifies as quotation (1978), Clark and Gerrig argue that translation simulates the propositional content and illocutionary force of an utterance sufficiently to be recognised as a form of quotation (1990, 777–8, 783–5, 788–9). This recognition enables a classification of modes of translation following the types and gradations of reported discourse. Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov has elaborated such a continuum (2006, 35–73). It stretches from free direct discourse at one end, which, in terms of translation, would be a mimetic version that never admits it is a translation (and would, therefore, once detected, be a case of plagiarism), to phenomena such as gist translation and ‘paraliptic résumé’ – the translator’s announcement that something that could have been translated has been omitted. The cline comprises both more diegetic and more mimetic forms of indirect discourse (of the kind an amateur interpreter might use when facilitating between a patient and a doctor: ‘she says she’s having a stomachache’), including free indirect discourse (the amateur interpreter to the doctor: ‘she’s having a stomachache’ as a rendering of the patient’s first-person statement to that effect). Most translations come in the shape of direct speech, with a reporting clause, however brief, announcing the inset and first-person displacement to accommodate the syntactic autonomy of the reported discourse. When Taivalkoski-Shilov’s cline is seen against the backdrop of Clark and Gerrig’s observations on the selective manner in which quotations represent their originals and the never wholly mimetic nature of the representation, we can appreciate not only that translations show varying degrees of reporter control over the translated utterance – more so as we tend to the scale’s diegetic pole of indirect discourse and summary, less so at the more mimetic end of direct speech – but also that this control will never be zero, if only because translation involves the selection and arrangement of words belonging to another tongue. And if translations cannot be wholly mimetic, this means they contain a diegetic element, a margin within which the translator’s agency and attitude can be articulated. To the extent that this articulation resonates in the translated discourse itself and affects its meaning, that discourse is rendered double-voiced and dialogical. The translator’s articulation of agency and attitude in translated texts brings consequences of accountability and ethics. If translations were wholly mimetic, the translator would be no more than the original author’s mouthpiece, and the overarching message in which a translator offers a translated text to an audience would be reduced to insignificance. In terms of the ‘production format’ Erving Goffman devised for utterances, the translator would be a mere ‘animator’, the soundbox through which messages are relayed (Goffman 1981, 144–5, 226). But if we think of translation as informed by a translator’s agency and carrying a diegetic margin for the articulation of a subject position, the translator assumes a certain responsibility for what is being said and becomes what Goffman terms an ‘author’ (Goffman 1981, 144–5, 226). The intermingling of reporting and

174  Concepts

reported voices in the translated text then creates room for irony. Irony plays especially in those cases in which the positionings outlined by the reporting and reported voices clash, as they do in discordant translations. Irony allows for many definitions and approaches; in what follows, I take my cue from Relevance theory because its treatment of irony seems clear-cut and amenable to translation (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 2004; Wilson and Sperber 1992). Relevance theory, which is interested in both cognitive and pragmatic aspects of language, distinguishes between descriptive and interpretive uses of language. We use language descriptively when we make assertions about the world. Language is used interpretively when it serves to represent another utterance or thought which it resembles, whether in linguistic expression or propositional content. Reported speech and also translation are instances of interpretive language use. Within the division of the interpretive use of language, Sperber and Wilson distinguish the special class of echoic utterances. An utterance is echoic when its understanding requires the recipient to recognise the speaker’s attitude toward the discourse which is being represented. This makes echoic utterances relatively complex; they represent anterior utterances, but, in addition, the recipient needs to register, as relevant to the communication, the attitude about that utterance which the speaker is signalling. The attitude itself may be positive or negative or any shade in between. Philips Numan’s emphatic loyalty to and admiration for Lipsius pervaded his rendering of Lipsius’s book on the miracles at Halle and were (and are), therefore, part of its meaning; or we could say, alternatively, that a reading of Numan’s translation that takes account of his evident attachment to Lipsius, as expressed in the translation’s paratexts, is bound to be richer than one that does not. Irony is a variety of echoic speech. Its distinctiveness lies in the particular nature of the speaker’s attitude, which is dissociative with respect to the utterance being represented. In other words, understanding irony requires a recipient to be aware that a speaker’s words reflect a pre-existing utterance, that the speaker’s attitude toward that utterance is relevant and that the attitude is dissociative – that is, disapproving, hostile, scornful, sceptical or non-harmonious in some other way. Van Oosterwijck’s hostility toward Lipsius, Numan’s opposition to Van Oosterwijck, Clement Egerton’s censure of the sexual licence of Jin Ping Mei and Samuel Dunster’s reservations about the indelicacies in Horace’s poems were all instances of the translators’ dissociative attitudes toward the texts they were representing. Numan may seem to be the odd one out in this listing, as his translation is primarily a supportive rendering of Lipsius; however, I read Numan’s explicit condemnation of his fellow translator and the corrective nature of his own version vis-à-vis Van Oosterwijck’s as sufficient evidence that Numan’s version reprises its predecessor, that he entertains an attitude toward the earlier translation that is relevant for our understanding of his own version and that this attitude is dissociative. Reading these various translations, then, while treating the translators’ dissociative attitudes as relevant, means understanding them as ironic utterances. Discordant translations are ironic translations.

Positioning Translators  175

Normally, speakers will signpost irony to ensure it will be picked up by the reader, viewer or listener. The paratextual scaffolding which the translators mentioned above erected around their versions served the purpose of signalling ironic intent. In her study of irony, however, Linda Hutcheon has argued that, to trigger ironic understanding, it is enough for a recipient to attribute ironic intent to a speaker, irrespective of whether the intent is stated or not, or even whether it is actually present (Hutcheon 1995, 143–5). This would mean that utterances or texts could be processed as ironic even in the absence of the speaker signalling ironic intent, provided the recipient has reason to suspect that irony may be afoot. Hutcheon’s observation shifts attention away from the source of the ironic discourse to the receiver as the agent construing meaning. It also chimes with Dorrit Cohn’s account of discordant narration. There, too, it is the reader who, on contextual grounds, ascribes to the author a stance which is at odds with that of the narrator, and this ascription then allows for the narrator’s discourse to be read against the grain. Irony demands considerable processing effort on the part of the receiver. It generates meanings which remain undeclared and must be inferred. In fact, irony depends precisely on the difference between what is stated and what is implied. Both Linda Hutcheon (1995) and Rachel Giora (1995) have stressed that, contrary to the common assumption that an ironist means the opposite of what he or she says and, therefore, says only one thing, irony involves two things being said at the same time, the dictum and the implicatum, and it is for the recipient to make sense of each and take the measure of their difference. In the case of a discordant translation such as Van Oosterwijck’s, the reader needs to process the text of the translation both as representing Lipsius’s Latin original and as conveying Van Oosterwijck’s ideological distance from Lipsius. Things may be more complicated than this. Numan’s version asks to be read as ironic in relation to Van Oosterwijck but not to Lipsius. Whereas both Van Oosterwijck and Numan (as regards Van Oosterwijck) are ironic throughout their respective performances, Egerton and Dunster are only intermittently so – that is, only in those places in which Egerton switches codes and Dunster appears conspicuously restrained. Negotiating these perspectival and evaluative leaps requires the reader to move from the text to the speech situation in question and back again. This means the performance of deictic shifts.

10.5 Edgework and Decomposition If irony is in the eye of the beholder, and the role of the reader increases accordingly, two major consequences follow. One is that we can describe the kind of communication taking place in ironic translations in terms of deictic shift theory (Duchan, Bruder and Hewitt 1995). The other is that we can recognise a translator’s evaluative stance or subject position not just in ironic translation but in all translating; in other words, while only some translating is ironic, all translating can be thought of as echoic.

176  Concepts

Although the latter claim is the more ambitious of the two, it is relatively easy to demonstrate, given the journey so far. Recalling Roger Fowler’s observation, mentioned previously, that we cannot say something without simultaneously conveying an attitude toward this something (1977, 76), and adding to this Wayne Booth’s comment, also made decades ago, that authors can, to some extent, choose their disguises, but they can never choose to disappear altogether, and, consequently, their judgements will always be present for anyone who knows how to look for them (Booth 1961, 20), it becomes a matter of course to assume that a speaker’s attitude underpins or inhabits their utterances. Indeed, Paul Grice’s conversational maxims (Grice 1991) take as much for granted, as does, for instance, the rhetorical approach to narrative which James Phelan champions (Phelan 2007). As Phelan puts it, a rhetorical approach conceives of narrative as a purposive communicative act, not just the representation of events but also itself an event, in that someone undertakes to tell a story to someone else on some occasion and for some reason (2007, 203). The approach pays attention to the relation among tellers, audiences and the story. In much the same way the approach to translation as reported discourse sets into relief the translator’s offering a translation to a new audience and goes on to speculate about how translators position themselves in the process and what purpose the positioning serves. This speculation is the reader’s work, and it takes place even in the absence of explicit statements signalling the translator’s intent. It is, therefore, the reader who chooses to read a translation as an intervention, to make a translator’s attitude toward a translated text relevant and, in so doing, to treat a text as echoic. The attitude a reader attributes to a translator need not be discordant. Indeed, discordance is the exception rather than the default. In most cases, and in the absence of contextual or other clues to the contrary, readers are likely to assume translators are either in sympathy with the authors they render or, as with much professional translating, indifferent. Contextual clues are rarely entirely absent, though. Just as Monika Fludernik has argued with reference to conversational narratives that storytellers do not merely present stories but, through their performance, create a ‘face’, a narrative identity which takes shape in a social context (Fludernik 2007, 260–1), so translators, too, project a public version of themselves by choosing to translate certain texts and translating them in a certain way for a certain prospective audience. In this respect, it matters, for example, that Numan’s translation of Lipsius was published in Brussels, and that he anticipated a positive response from the Catholic audience he will have regarded as the only ratified participants in the communication. Van Oosterwijck similarly expected his Calvinist audience to appreciate his pouring scorn on Lipsius and the Catholic belief in miracles. In explicitly adhering to social norms of propriety, Clement Egerton and Samuel Dunster, likewise, presented themselves as in tune with values alive in the communities they addressed, and they followed generations of translators adopting similar stances with reference to similar issues in similar texts. If they acted as gatekeepers in upholding shared values, or at least values they shared with their envisaged

Positioning Translators  177

primary audience, they counted on their readers’ approval of their actions. As mentioned before, perhaps the social and cultural significance of translation consists less in its instrumental role as a channel for the importation of foreign goods than in the value judgements attached to those goods as they are brought in and the ideological and other filters that subsequently affect the texts. From this point of view, the interaction between translators and audiences and the way readers interpret the translator’s stance is of considerable importance. This leaves the question of how, in practice, readers detect a translator’s stance in the translated text itself. Readers can, of course, process translations instrumentally as transparent vehicles of the originals they represent. This is not only common, often it is a pragmatic necessity. However, as discordant translations show, and as the argument for treating all translation as echoic suggests, it pays to make the translator’s positioning part of the communication which translation establishes. This is where deictic shift theory may be of help. It can serve as a reminder that, while translators may consciously position themselves with respect to the texts they render, the discourses they use also inevitably position them, whether they are speaking in their own name or not. The two positionings do not necessarily coincide, and they are effective only insofar as audiences construe them. Deictic shift theory, as presented, for instance, in Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics, emphasises the context-dependency of speech (Stockwell 2002, 43; Herman 2002, 346). The prototypical deictic centre is anchored in the ‘I-herenow’ of the speaker. In the case of fiction, this may be an author, who may then invent one or more narrators. If we understand translation as reported discourse, the primary deictic centre is the translator who presents an author to a new audience. Of the various deictic projections which Stockwell surveys (perceptual, spatial, temporal, relational, textual and compositional; 2002, 44–6), textual deixis seems the most directly relevant to translation, as it includes the foregrounding of references to the text itself or its production, as well as claims to plausibility, verisimilitude or authenticity. In the case of translation, these would usually be paratextual statements bearing on the kind of rendering on offer (‘faithfully translated’, ‘a new version’, ‘authorised translation’ and so on). If readers read translations instrumentally, in the sense described above, as transparent reproductions of their originals, the first-person displacement typical of translation in direct-speech mode will see to it that, once the translated text gets under way and sustains the illusion that the original is being read through the reproduction, the initial deictic shift from translator’s frame to quoted speech is quickly forgotten. Stockwell calls this process of forgetting an initial deictic centre ‘decomposition’ (2002, 48–9). It allows the frame to dissolve in the reader’s mind, enabling a reading of the translation as if it were the original. Some styles of translating strongly promote this illusion. As early as the 1960s, Jiří Levý spoke of ‘illusionist’ translations, which endeavour to make readers forget they are reading a translation (1969, 31–2). Illusionist, or ‘fluent’ or ‘domesticating’ translations, as they are more commonly called today, require the translator to

178  Concepts

feign discretion in an attempt to disappear behind the original author, but they depend equally on compliant readers losing sight of the translational frame and being willing to accommodate the reading position naturalised by the translated text (Martin and White 2005, 206). However, keeping a speaker in focus and making the speaker’s attitude relevant to an utterance is in the recipient’s power. ‘Tactical’ readings, as Martin and White (2005, 206) call them, decline to subscribe to the reading position naturalised by the text. They can be applied to translation regardless of whether the translator’s stance is illusionist, discordant, consonant with that of the original author or indifferent to it. This mode of reading keeps the translational frame alive, including any textual or contextual indicators of the translator’s attitude toward the work being presented in translation, and lets that knowledge inform and, indeed, inflect (or should we say infect?) the actual translation. It involves stepping out of the translated text to relate it to its frame whenever it seems appropriate to do so, crossing the boundaries between the respective deictic fields. Stockwell calls this ‘edgework’ (2002, 49). Some shifts, such as paratextual interventions, will be easy to negotiate; others may be more indirect and draw on intertextual echoes and contrasts, from choices made in different translations to the deployment of terms belonging to certain cultural, ideological or other formations. They represent different ways in which translators can be seen to choose their ground, shuffle their footing and profile themselves as they perform. The sum total of the perceptions that result from recipients accomplishing these shifts constitutes the translator’s individual and social signature. Tactical ways of reading, and the constant edgework they require in crossing the deictic boundaries between framing and reported discourse, make more of translations than compliant readings do. On one hand, they awaken the latent self-reference of translation by recalling the connection between reporting and reported speech, the frame and the performance of translation. On the other, their toggling between these deictic levels serves to explore the translator’s selfpositioning, from ‘face’ to footing, construing a social identity for the translator in the process. It is this construction that ascribes agency and judgement to the translator and, ultimately, makes translation a socially relevant form of communication.

10.6 Coda Translation demands a translator. Translators are responsible for producing the words we encounter on the pages of translated texts. It seems reasonable to assume that their manual intervention will leave traces in the texts themselves. How are these traces to be identified and interpreted? This question led, almost 20 years ago, to attempts to map the translator’s voice or discursive presence in translated texts. Giuliana Schiavi (1996) designed a model based on narratological schemes of structuralist inspiration. The model did not work, if only because it sought to integrate both original and translation into a single diagram. My

Positioning Translators  179

own example-based attempt (Hermans 1996) did little more than highlight some rather obvious, explicit translatorial asides. Yet the matter would not go away, and as the study of translation turned increasingly to the translator’s social and ethical roles, it became, if anything, more urgent. At the same time, postclassic approaches to narrative abandoned narratology’s earlier fixation on taxonomies and formal grammars in favour of interactions between texts and audiences, while the combination of pragmatic and cognitive insights in both linguistics and poetics foregrounded the activity of readers as participants in meaning-making. The approach in the preceding pages takes its cue from these developments. It still suggests a general model of translation – translation as echoic speech – but insists that it is within the reader’s power to activate the model or not. The model’s categories are not sharply drawn, and its main function is in enabling the perception of the translator’s agency. That agency matters not because it can be fitted into a model but because it has social significance.

Bibliography Booth, Wayne. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Brome, Alexander, ed. 1680. The Poems of Horace, Consisting of Odes, Satyrs, and Epistles. 3rd ed. London: H. Brome. Clark, Herbert and Richard Gerrig. 1990. ‘Quotations as Demonstrations’. Language 66, 764–805. Cohn, Dorrit. 2000. ‘Discordant Narration’. Style 34, 307–16. Duchan, Judith, Gail Bruder, and Lynne Hewitt, ed. 1995. Deixis in Narrative: A Cognitive Science Perspective. Hillsdale & Hove: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Dunster, Samuel. 1729. Horace’s Satires, Epistles and Art of Poetry, Done into English. 4th ed. London: W. Mears, F. Clay and D. Brown. Egerton, Clement. 1954. The Golden Lotus: A Translation, from the Chinese Original, of the novel Chin P’ing Mei [1939]. 4 vols. New York: Grove Press. Fludernik, Monika. 2007. ‘Identity/Alterity’. In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, 260–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fowler, Roger. 1977. Linguistics and the Novel. London: Methuen. Giora, Rachel. 1995. ‘On Irony and Negation’. Discourse Processes 19, 239–64. Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell. Goodman, Nelson. 1978. ‘Some Questions Concerning Quotation’. In Ways of Worldmaking, edited by Nelson Goodman, 41–56. Indianapolis: Hackett. Grice, Paul. 1991. Studies in the Way of Words [1989]. Cambridge (Mass.) & London: Harvard University Press. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press. Hermans, Theo. 1996. ‘The Translator’s Voice in Translated Narrative’. Target 8: 23–48. Reprinted in Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 195–212. London & New York: Routledge, 2010. Hermans, Theo. 2007. The Conference of the Tongues. Manchester: St Jerome. Hermans, Theo. 2010. ‘The Translator as Evaluator’. In Text and Context: Essays on Translation and Interpreting in Honour of Ian Mason, edited by Mona Baker, Maeve Olohan and Maria Calzada Pérez, 63–76. Manchester: St Jerome.

180  Concepts

Hutcheon, Linda. 1995. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London & New York: Routledge. Krog, Antjie. 1999. Country of My Skull. London: Vintage. Levý, Jiří. 1969. Die literarische Übersetzung. Theorie einer Kunstgattung. Translated by W. Schamschula. Frankfurt & Bonn: Athenäum. Lipsius, Justus. 1604. Diva Virgo Hallensis. Antwerp: Joannes Moretus. Lipsius, Justus. 1605. I. Lipsii Heylige maghet van Halle […] Wt de Latijnsche in onse Nederlantsche tale overgheset […] tot bespottinghe der Pauselicke Roomsche afgoderije. Translated by Albert van Oosterwijck. Delft: Bruyn Harmansz. Schinkel. Lipsius, Justus. 1607. Die heylighe maghet van Halle […] Onlancx uyt den Latyne int Nederlantsche overghesedt door Philippus Numan. Brussels: Rutger Velpius. Martin, J.R. and Peter White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave. Phelan, James. 2007. ‘Rhetoric/Ethics’. In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, edited by David Herman, 203–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pym, Anthony. 2004. ‘Propositions on Cross-Cultural Communication and Translation’. Target 16, 1–28. Schiavi, Giuliana. 1996. ‘There is Always a Teller in a Tale’. Target 8, 1–22. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. 2004. ‘Relevance Theory’. In The Handbook of Pragmatics, edited by Laurence Horn and Gregory Ward, 607–32. Oxford: Blackwell. Sternberg, Meir. 1982. ‘Proteus in Quotation-Land. Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Discourse’. Poetics Today 3 (2), 107–56. Stockwell, Peter. 2002. Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina. 2006. La tierce main. Le discours rapporté dans les traductions françaises de Fielding au XVIIIe siècle. Arras: Artois Presses Université. Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber. 1992. ‘On Verbal Irony’. Lingua 87, 53–76.

PART 3

Histories





11 IMAGES OF TRANSLATION Metaphor and Imagery in the Renaissance Discourse on Translation [1985]

11.1 Images, Metaphors and Metalanguage In the Renaissance and Early Modern conception of literature, translation and imitation stand in a curious relation to each other. They are often discussed together and regarded as closely related or complementary activities, but on other occasions, they are felt to be miles apart. Especially in the seventeenth century, we may find them described in similar terms, sometimes by means of the same images, analogies and metaphors, but even at the level of their respective metalanguages, they may touch at one point and, perhaps, overlap, but they rarely, if ever, merge completely. Broadly speaking, the view among Renaissance writers, translators and critics seems to be that, insofar as translation and imitation are considered in conjunction, translation is, at best, a particular and restricted form of imitation and, at worst, a mechanical and merely utilitarian exercise of little or no literary merit. Even when translation and imitation are seen as closely related concepts, translation is invariably presented as the less deserving of the two. The main reasons appear to be, first, that the ultimate goal of ‘total’ translation, which would reproduce the source text faithfully and completely in all its aspects across the language barrier, is deemed unattainable; second, that the freedom of movement of translators is severely restricted because they always find themselves in a subordinate and even subservient position with regard to their model; and third, that whatever its relative value, the translated text remains a copy of an original work and is, by definition, inferior to that work, the more so because translation, in contrast to imitation, denies itself the emulative impulse which would make the translator challenge the original author. The paradoxical relationship between translation and imitation may be illustrated with reference to some treatises and handbooks on the art of poetry from DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-15

184 

Histories

mid-sixteenth-century France. In the chapter on translation in his Art poétique of 1545, for example, Jacques Peletier du Mans calls translation ‘the truest kind of imitation’, but he goes on to describe the translator as one who, in rhetorical terms, ‘subjects himself ’ not only to someone else’s inventio but also to the dispositio and, if possible, to the elocutio of the original author’s work.1 At the end of the chapter, he conjures up the chimaera of a ‘total’ translation of Virgil, which would render the Latin word for word and sentence for sentence while preserving all the grace and elegance of the original text, only to conclude that ‘it cannot be done’.2 Thomas Sebillet’s Art poétique françoys (1548), by contrast, paints a more optimistic picture. Reflecting the marked upturn in translation activity in France from around 1530 onward (Guillerm 1980, 6), Sebillet can claim that ‘[t]ranslation is nowadays very much favoured by poets of esteem and by learned readers’ and, in a typically favourable comparison, he describes the translator as one who ‘extracts the hidden treasure from the bowels of the earth in order to put it to common use’.3 Barely a year later, however, translation is cut down to size again in Joachim du Bellay’s Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549). While Du Bellay concedes a limited role for literal translation as an instrument for the dissemination of knowledge (1948, 34, 59, 192), he denies that translation can play a part in the growth of literature or the enrichment of the vernacular (1948, 32, 38). Du Bellay rejects translation of literature because of its inability to transfer intact ‘that energy, and – what shall I call it – that spirit, which the Romans would have termed genius’ and which, apparently, resides in works of art. The translator, then, is like a painter who can depict a person’s body but not his soul4 – an image which John Dryden will repeat, with minor variations, nearly 150 years later in his criticism of the word-for-word translations of Barten Holyday and Robert Stapylton.5 In place of translation, Du Bellay advocates imitation, significantly changing the metaphors in his exposition as well. The French poets, he says, should do as the Romans did, ‘imitating the best Greek writers, transforming themselves into them, devouring them and, having digested them well, converting them into blood and nourishment’.6 The provenance of this digestive imagery is easy to trace. Du Bellay took it, directly or indirectly, from Seneca. The image itself is part of a series of ‘transformative’ analogies and metaphors commonly used both in the ancient Roman and in the Renaissance discourse on imitation. Thanks to a number of modern studies on the principles and the metalanguage of Renaissance imitation (Gmelin 1932; Von Stackelberg 1956; Pigman 1980), we know that among the variants of the ‘transformative’ cluster of analogies are apian, simian and filial metaphors and that, apart from this class of images, we can distinguish a series of ‘dissimulative’ metaphors and analogies, in which the need to conceal or disguise the relation between the imitation and the model is emphasised, and an ‘eristic’ series, which employs images of strife, struggle and competition with the model, but which also includes, in its weaker version, the notion of following in someone’s footsteps. As G.W. Pigman (1980, 9) has pointed out, these images, analogies

Images of Translation  185

and metaphors are not just incidental ornaments; on the contrary, they carry the burden of the argument and are at the heart of the concept of imitation as the various writers and theorists see it. As regards the images, metaphors and analogies of the Renaissance discourse on translation, everything remains to be done in the task of collating and interpreting them, although there have been isolated attempts to describe certain aspects of the Renaissance theory of translation from this angle (Steiner 1970; Guillerm 1980; occasional remarks in Zuber 1963, 1968). As in the case of imitation, the images appear to be highly functional, and they form an integral part of the Renaissance theory of translation. They bear on the very possibility of translation as well as on the relation between a translation and its original and between translators and their audiences. The existence of a rich international stock of metaphors in Renaissance texts about translation is obvious at a glance and has, indeed, been pointed out more than once. Its relevance should be equally obvious. When, toward the middle of the seventeenth century, the norms of literary translation change as the socalled ‘new way of translating’ comes into vogue in France and England, the shift is signalled by a change in the metaphorical apparatus in translators’ prefaces and critical statements. On the other hand, the division of labour between translation and imitation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the changing attitudes toward it, are also reflected in the distribution of the images and metaphors used to discuss both activities. Peletier’s metaphors of submission and of digging up valuable treasures, for example, are commonplace in the sixteenth-century discourse of translation, but they are not normally part of the metalanguage of imitation, while Du Bellay’s images of digestion and transformation are not normally found in statements on translation, at least not in the sixteenth century. The material for an investigation into these images and metaphors, then, is extracted not from the translations themselves, but from the contemporary discourse on translation – that is, from the metatexts of translation. They include prefaces and dedications, laudatory poems and occasional statements in various handbooks, critical works and letters. To put the account in the following pages into perspective, two cautionary remarks are in order. The first involves a question of interpretation. Whereas handbooks, critical works and letters will, on the whole, contain relatively ‘neutral’ statements, which can often be accepted at face value, liminary texts such as laudatory poems, prefaces and dedications are governed by rhetorical conventions, and they will frequently exaggerate their conventional postures, topoi and formulae. In prefaces, and even more so in dedications, the expected stance is one of modesty, even self-deprecation. Translators will, consequently, understate their abilities and achievement in order to highlight the difficulty of the task, the excellence of the model and/or the erudition of the patron (Leiner 1965). The opposite applies to congratulatory poems, which are given to overstatement and hyperbole (Curtius 1953, 163–4) and, in their fulsome praise, upgrade the translator’s accomplishment and self-image. As we shall see, the imagery used in these two contrasting conventions is of some interest.

186 

Histories

The second remark concerns the fact that a systematic investigation of the kind attempted here is hampered by the lack of specialist bibliographies (in each of the languages covered: English, French, Dutch and German) and of modern scholarly editions of many of the relevant texts. Exhaustiveness is, therefore, out of the question. The absence of thorough bibliographies (giving details of such things as prefaces, dedications, dedicatees, laudatory poems and their authors) and of modern editions of translated literature is no doubt symptomatic of the peripheral position of translation studies in the scholarly study of literature generally.

11.2 Footsteps, Freedom and Borrowed Goods In the course of their theoretical reflections, the Renaissance translators frequently refer to the brief comments on translation made by Cicero and Horace (with the latter’s one and a half lines about the fidus interpres usually being taken out of context and misunderstood), but for our present purposes, Quintilian’s more extensive comments on imitation provide a more convenient starting point. In Book X of his Institutio oratoria, Quintilian, having stated the pre-eminence of inventio over imitatio, discusses the practice of imitation in terms of ‘following in the tracks of others’ and ‘treading in the forerunner’s footsteps’, stressing, in the same breath, the need to compete with the model because ‘the man whose aim is to prove himself better than another, even if he does not surpass him, may hope to equal him’, whereas ‘the mere follower must always lag behind’ (Quintilian 1922, vol. 4, 79). In any case, he goes on, imitation in the absolute sense is both impossible and futile; not even nature can produce an exact likeness, and ‘whatever is like another object must necessarily be inferior to the substance [and] the portrait to the features which it portrays’ (1922, vol. 4, 79–81). The idea of contest (contendere potius quam sequi) gives imitation its emulative edge. Pseudo-Longinus treats it in terms of wrestling with a stronger opponent, a struggle that leads to inevitable but honourable defeat (On the Sublime, Chapter 13); Dryden copies the image almost verbatim in the preface to his Troilus and Cressida (1679).7 In the Renaissance literature on imitation, the footsteps topos, derived from Quintilian, is used in various ways. In its strongest formulation, the aspect of emulation is indicated by metaphors denoting contest and competition, and it goes hand in hand with the wrestling image. Another variant, which, for obvious reasons, has no equivalent in the discourse on translation, is found in Petrarch, who makes avoiding the footsteps of his predecessors a central principle of his conception of imitation (Pigman 1980, 21). In its weaker form, the vestigia topos appears simply as following an admired model at a respectful distance. For the Renaissance translators, the footsteps metaphor proves useful in a variety of ways. In its strictest application, to follow an author step by step usually means translating word for word. Although in the early Renaissance, for example, in Germany, strict word-for-word translation was sometimes seen as a commendable imitation of Latin style (Schwarz 1944, 369), most later translators are prepared to follow their source text only so closely as the ‘propriety’ or the

Images of Translation  187

‘nature’ of the target language will allow. The metaphor can then still be used to indicate the strictest possible adherence to the model without any deviation from its meaning. The French translator Etienne de Courcelles employs the image in this sense in a letter of 1628 to Hugo Grotius: ‘I was so afraid of weakening your argument by straying from your words that I followed them closely throughout, as far as the property of our language permitted it’.8 In the preface to his Dutch translation (1635) of Grotius’s Latin play Sofompaneas, Joost van den Vondel adopts a more relaxed approach: ‘We have not wanted to follow too closely on the heels of the Latin, nor stray too far from our distinguished predecessor’, and he leaves it to Grotius to judge whether he has successfully steered this middle course.9 In this somewhat freer approach the natural image is that of following at a certain distance. Indeed, the more liberal translators frequently criticise their stricter colleagues for treading upon their authors’ heels – that is, doing them an injustice by adhering too closely to their every word. ‘I do not affect to follow my author so close as to tread upon his heels’, W.L. notes in the preface to his version of Virgil’s Eclogues (Amos 1920, 146). At the end of the century, John Dryden, in his ‘Discourse Concerning Satire’ (1692), comments on Barten Holyday and Robert Stapylton in the same terms: We have followed our authors at greater distance, tho’ not step by step, as they have done. For oftentimes they have gone so close that they have trod on the heels of Juvenal and Persius, and hurt them by their too near approach. A noble author would not be pursued too close by a translator. (Dryden 1962, vol. 2, 153) However, the footsteps metaphor is used by translators not just to describe their policy in translating but also to express the hierarchal relationship between the source and target texts. The sense of hierarchy is already present in Quintilian’s statements on imitation as the relation of front runner to follower. In the case of translation, the metaphor should be seen – and often occurs – in conjunction with a host of other images and direct pronouncements denoting subordination and qualitative inferiority. The position of power and authority which the source text holds vis-à-vis the target text is probably the most obvious. ‘Following’, in this context, implies not only dependence in the logical and chronological sense, the translated text being derived from the source text, but also a relation of stronger versus weaker, of free versus confined and of owner or master versus servant or slave. To translate is to accept confinement and restriction of one’s liberty of movement in order to follow in someone else’s tracks. ‘We might have written more sweetly had we not wanted to tie ourselves more closely to the text’, the young Vondel observes in the preface to his Dutch translation of Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas in 1620.10 In the address ‘To the Reader’ which prefaces his 1616 version of Theophrastus’s Characters, John Healey points out that, ‘to be too servile or too licentious, are alike amisse in a Translater’, for one ‘darkneth the beautie of the worke’ and the

188 

Histories

other ‘implieth a secret disabling, as if the Original might be bettered’, but, he concludes, ‘if there were a necessity to erre in either, I had rather be too strict than any whit too bold’ (Lathrop 1933, 264). This sense of the translator’s restricted freedom is accepted later in the century, even by the freer translators such as Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt and John Denham (though not by Abraham Cowley), but it is again more strongly emphasised by Dryden when he feels he has to stake out his own position with regard to the ‘libertine’ translators of the school of Denham and Cowley. In his preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), Dryden stresses that the translator’s freedom concerns phrasing only; it does not extend to matters of substance: ‘I suppose he may stretch his Chain to such a Latitude, but by innovation of thoughts, methinks he breaks it’ (Dryden 1962, vol. 1, 272). In the dedication of his Aeneid (1697), he puts it even more strongly: ‘But slaves we are, and labour on another man’s plantation; we dress the vineyard, but the wine is the owner’s’ (1962, vol. 2, 250). Being no more than labourers who works for a master, translators take no credit for their work, as translation does not confer ownership of intellectual property. As early as 1529, Richard Hyrd explains in the prologue to his translation of Juan Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman that, if there is anything good in the book, it is entirely due to Vives, who wrote it, and to Thomas More, who checked the translation (Nugent 1956, 75). The ‘Epistle to the Reader’ in John Stradling’s 1595 translation of Justus Lipsius’s Two Books of Constancie invites us to give thanks to God, to Lipsius and to Stradling’s patron, in that order (Vanderheyden 1979, 161). While these translators may be excluding themselves out of conventional self-effacing modesty, the Art poétique (1545) of Peletier du Mans, a book of a different kind, states, in the same vein, that a translator can never lay claim to the title of author and that it is the translator’s name which lives on through that of his author, not the other way round (1930, 106). There is an unmistakable note of resentment – or is it a rhetorical captatio benevolentiae? – in Hugues Salel’s prefatory poem to his version of the first ten books of the Iliad (1545), when he states that translation is ‘a difficult task that brings much labour and little honour, for whatever the perfect translator may achieve, the honour always goes to the original writer’.11 This also applies to Etienne Pasquier’s rather sour remark in 1594 about translation being ‘a wretched, thankless and slavish labour’.12 Examples of this kind could be multiplied (Guillerm 1980, 8–10). It is very unusual to see the relation of power between source text and target text turned upside down in statements made by translators themselves. One such exception is Philemon Holland’s preface to his version of Pliny (1601), which resorts to military imagery in its call to the English people to endeavour by all means to triumph now over the Romans in subduing their literature under the dent of the English pen, in requitall of the conquest sometime over this Island, atchieved by the edge of their sword. (Matthiessen 1931, 179)

Images of Translation  189

On the whole, though, only the laudatory poems emphatically invert the hierarchy between original and translation. According to Ben Jonson’s two epigrams (1609) in praise of the translator Clement Edmonds, it is Edmonds who has made Caesar’s name immortal rather than the other way round ( Jonson 1963, 54–55); and Thomas Stanley’s commendatory poem on Edward Sherburne’s translation of Seneca’s Medea (1648) declares that Sherburne deserves ‘a double wreath: for all that we / Unto the poet owe, he owes to thee’ (Stanley 1962, 64). Around the same time, the Dutchman Isaac Vos uses some elaborate military imagery in his complimentary verses on Lion de Fuyter’s Dutch version of Lope de Vega’s Carpio, or the Confused Court (1647), describing how the translator has brought back ‘in triumph’ Spain’s most valuable treasure, concluding: be content, Lope, To follow with quick strides Your conqueror, who will share with you The praise for the Confused Court. Be glad, Vega, who are his captive By law of arms, that he is prepared To share with you that which is wholly his.13 Similarly, in his congratulatory lines on Dryden’s translation of Persius (1693), William Congreve exclaims that Persius was ‘dead in himself, in you alone he lives’, and ‘[t]o you, we, all this following Treasure owe’ (Kinsley and Kinsley 1971, 206). However, the fact itself that the translator’s subordination to the original author is so insistently turned on its head in complimentary poems suggests that the sense of hierarchy is very much present in the translators’ minds. The property relation to which Dryden referred previously – that of master to servant, of owner to hired labourer or slave – also occurs in a different form, in the figure of the translator showing off with borrowed feathers or under false pretences. In the preface to his translation of Du Bartas (1620), Vondel describes the translator as a magpie among peacocks, trying unsuccessfully to don peacock feathers (1927–40, vol. 2, 229); the image is familiar from sixteenth-century emblem books and derives from Ovid. Vondel’s compatriot Constantijn Huygens puts it in characteristically ambivalent fashion when, in the introductory poem to his Dutch version of a number of English epigrams in 1650, he admits that he is offering only ‘borrowed enjoyment’ but adds that ‘even borrowed goods are good goods’, because they come from ‘noble spirits’;14 the rest of the poem then turns into a clever defence of the role of the translator as mediator. The subordination to the model is most strongly felt by the literal translators. For those who advocate a somewhat freer approach, this abject submission becomes something they resent and reject, in terms that stress the opposition between a certain degree of liberty, on the one hand, and total servility, b­ ondage and superstitious submission on the other. As early as 1540, Etienne Dolet’s Maniere de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre lists as the third of its five rules that ‘in

190  Histories

translating one should not become so subservient as to translate word for word’,15 and, in the preface to Persius his Satires (1616), Barten Holyday proudly announces: I have not herein bound my selfe with a ferularie superstition to the letter: but with the ancient libertie of a Translator, have used a moderate paraphrase […]: yet so, that with all convenient possibilities, I stick unto his Wordes. (Kitagaki 1981, 162–3) In the same year, François de Malherbe explains in the preface to his French translation of Pliny that, rather than adhering to ‘the servitude of translating word for word’, he has taken the liberty of adding and omitting in order to clear up obscurities in the source text and to avoid offending the delicate stylistic sensibilities of his audience.16 Malherbe points the way to the more libertine conception of translation that would gain ground in France and England in the following decades. In the preface to his first published translation, the Octavius of Minucius Felix (1637), Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, the leading exponent of the belles infidèles, denounces the ‘Judaic superstition’ of tying oneself to the words of the source text rather than communicating what the words are meant to express.17 When, a few years later, in the preface to his Annals of Tacitus (1640), he asserts – perhaps unexpectedly – that, apart from a few omissions dictated by ‘les delicatesses de nostre Langue’, he has everywhere else followed [Tacitus] step by step, and rather as a slave than as a companion, although I could perhaps have taken more liberty, for I am not translating a passage, but a Book,18 there is every reason to believe that he is giving an ironic twist to a stock metaphor because, in the same paragraph, he again denounces ‘overscrupulous translators’ – a condemnation he repeats in subsequent prefaces (for example, in 1654 and 1662; Perrot d’Ablancourt 1972, 188, 202). In England, the advocates of the ‘new way’ of translating leave no doubt about their rejection of the translator’s traditional servility. In his well-known poem on Richard Fanshawe’s 1648 version of Battista Guarini’s Pastor Fido, John Denham puts it squarely: ‘That servile path thou nobly dost decline / Of tracing word by word and line by line’. Nevertheless, while he dismisses the ‘narrowness’ and ‘slavish brains’ of the stricter translators, he still accepts that a degree of confinement and restriction are the translator’s inescapable condition: ‘Yet after all (lest we should think it thine) / Thy spirit to his circle dost confine’ (Steiner 1975, 63–4). The ‘free’ translator’s newly won freedom, in other words, is largely a matter of broadening the unit of translation from the individual word, line or sentence to larger wholes, but it does not affect the essential hierarchy of power and ownership that exists between author and translator. Just as the lack of inventio in a translation puts translators in a secondary position with regard to original writers,

Images of Translation  191

so the pre-eminence and authority of the original author’s inventio forces even the most libertine translators into some form of accommodation. Perhaps the only exception in this respect is Abraham Cowley’s defiant preface to his Pindarique Odes (1656). He, too, rejects the work of the stricter translators as ‘a vile and unworthy kinde of Servitude’ but goes on to claim absolute freedom of action: I have in these two Odes of Pindar taken, left out, and added what I please; nor make it so much my aim to let the Reader know precisely what he spoke, as what was his way and manner of speaking. (Steiner 1975, 67) Cowley, however, is indifferent to whether his version is called translation or imitation. His method, and the ‘competitive’ metaphors in the preface to the Pindarique Odes (‘resolving […] to shoot beyond the Mark’), point to an emulative urge normally absent from the discourse on translation proper.

11.3 Garments and Status As was indicated above, the footsteps metaphor and its variants can be used to express not only the translator’s subordination to his model but also the perception of a qualitative difference between the translated text and its source. In this respect, too, there is a whole series of associated images and analogies suggesting the inferiority of the translation and the deficient talents of the translator when compared with the original and its author. In contrast with Cowley’s assertion that, rather than endeavouring to produce a copy of the source text, one should aim to go beyond it (‘for men resolving in no case to shoot beyond the Mark, it is a thousand to one if they shoot not short of it’), the more conventional translators are fully prepared to admit their weakness and, hence, the futility of contesting the original author’s superiority. In the prologue to his rendering of Sophocles’s Electra (1537), Lazare de Baïf concedes that he is not sufficiently well versed in either Greek or French to be able to compete with Sophocles (he was, in fact, working from Erasmus’s Latin version of the play), so he is content to be ‘no more than his simple faithful translator’.19 Vondel repeatedly uses similes, mostly derived from Ovid, implying that the translator is bound to come to grief if he challenges his model’s superiority: the translator is like Phaeton, who wanted to drive the chariot of the sun and was struck down (1620); if he attempts to compete with David’s psalms, he will suffer Lucifer’s fate (1640); if he hopes to outdo Sophocles, he is like Pan challenging Apollo and will end up growing donkey’s ears like Midas (1668) (Vondel 1927–40, vol. 2, 229–30; vol. 4; 53; vol. 10, 548). In a number of similar images, Vondel expresses the translator’s inferior powers in terms of limping behind the model, or in the opposition between soaring high and flying low, as in the dedicatory poem accompanying his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1671): ‘We have tried, sailing low to the ground, and in the shadow of [Ovid] who soars

192  Histories

on high like an eagle, to follow him at a distance’.20 Further analogies include that of the inexperienced choirboy and the lead singer (1616) and of the original song and its faint echo (1660) (Vondel 1927–40, vol. 1, 477; vol. 6, 86). Huygens speaks in the same vein of being happy merely to ‘stammer after’ John Donne (1892–99, vol. 6, 338). There are several other clusters of metaphors and analogies emphasising the inferior quality of the translated work. Guérin de la Pinelière’s dedication of his translation of Seneca’s Hippolytus (1635) refers to ‘offering false pearls and pieces of crystal in place of diamonds’.21 The preface to Nicholas Haward’s version of Eutropius (1564) says that those unable to read the original language ‘must needes contente themselves to wade only in the troubled streames of Translators: for that they are not able to attayne to the well spryng it selfe’ ( Jones 1953, 19). Among the more common images are those describing a translation as the reverse side of a tapestry and translating as exchanging the original’s sumptuous garb for a rough and homespun garment. In the prologue to his Electra (1537), Lazare de Baïf refers to the story of Themistocles (as told by Plutarch), who did not want to speak to the Persian king through an interpreter because, he said, a translation was no better than the reverse side of a tapestry, and De Baïf duly concludes that ‘in my translation I cannot show you anything but the reverse side of Sophocles’ triumphant and excellent tapestry’.22 The image is subsequently used in the same sense by, among others, Cervantes (Don Quixote, Part Two, 1615), James Howell and his French translator Jean Baudoin (Dendrologie 1641; Zuber 1968, 87), the Frenchman E.B. (in a 1644 translation of Cicero; ibid., 86) and in an epigram on translation by Huygens (1622; Huygens 1892–9, vol. 7, 8). The garment metaphor, which is attested dozens of times, is not necessarily disparaging in itself (see below) but becomes a vehicle for expressing the inferiority of the translated text through the opposition of a rich versus a poor garment. The opposition occurs in some ingenious variations: a ‘playne and homespun English cote’ in contrast with an original ‘richely clad in Romayne vesture’ (Arthur Golding 1564), the original’s ‘Velvet’ versus ‘our Countrie cloth’ (Thomas Wilson 1570), a translation ‘newlie arraied with course English cloth’ (Abraham Fleming 1581), and, even more colourful: ‘their rich and sumptuous French garments’, ‘robes of Salomon’ and ‘riche mans purple’ as opposed to ‘poore and base English weeds’, ‘the rags of Frus’ and ‘Lazarus patches’ ( Joshua Sylvester, 1592; Jones 1953, 19–22). Vondel further refers to his translations in terms of a pale star that derives its light from the sun (1616), candlelight compared to sunlight (1635) and reflected light in contrast with direct light (1660; Vondel 1927–40, vol. 1, 477; vol. 6, 86). As these examples show, the metaphors often serve the dual purpose of stressing the derivative nature of the translated text as well as its qualitative inferiority. On only one occasion does Vondel turn the image into a cautious justification of translation by pointing out that even a faint light will shine in the darkness (1927–40, vol. 1, 477). Huygens, on the other hand, is more determined in his revaluation of such metaphors, arguing in a poem of 1650 that the weaknesses of

Images of Translation  193

the translation highlight the excellencies of the original just as a painting needs the contrast between light and dark and that shaded light is beneficial to those who are dazzled by bright sunlight – meaning, presumably, readers unfamiliar with the original language.23 The contrast between the source and target texts in terms of a solid body or substance versus a mere shadow provides yet another means to underline both the derivative and the inferior quality of the translated work. The passage in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria still echoes in John Florio’s address to the reader in his translation of Montaigne (1603); his version, he admits, falls short of the quality of the source text ‘as much as arte’s nature is short of nature’s art, a picture of a body, a shadow of a substance’ (Matthiessen 1931, 117). As late as 1700, the dialogue between Eumenes and Philenor prefaced to the anonymous translation of Lucian’s Charon speaks of translation being only ‘a Shadow and Resemblance of the Original Piece’ (Kitagaki 1981, 300). Huygens describes translations as ‘shadows of beautiful bodies’ in 1625 and 1630 (1892–9, vol. 1, 285; 1910–7, vol. 1, 289), but in a poem of 1633, which may be counted as one of the most elegant statements on translation in the seventeenth century, he again manages a witty revaluation. In successive stanzas, he explores the various aspects of the simile, arguing that, although shadows are like the night, they are still daughters of light; although they are distorted shapes, something of the original form remains visible; although they are dark and obscure, it is a poor reader who cannot see through them; although they are lacking in warmth, their coolness is only superficial and, like pepper corns, they are hot inside; although they are mere nothings, they are embodied nothings, and, like daydreams, feed on the material world.24 Huygens’ argumentation appears designed to counteract, if only to a limited extent, the negative import of the shadow metaphor by focusing on the relative value and use of translation: for all its deficiencies, it can retain the most essential characteristics of the model from which it derives. Huygens’s play with metaphors encapsulates his moderate attitude toward translation generally, a mixture of scepticism and appreciation, inasmuch as he is prepared to argue that limited value need not mean absence of any value whatever. It is, again, only in the hyperbolic language of the laudatory poems that the view of translation as second-hand and second-best, as derivative and qualitatively inferior, is negated and the relationship between translation and original inverted. Translation then comes out on top and the source text is assigned second place. The commendatory poem by a certain I. Knight on Barten Holyday’s Persius (1616) puts it bluntly, with an interesting variant on the footsteps metaphor: How truly with thine author thou dost pace, How hand in hand ye go […] He might be thought to have translated thee, But that he’s darker, not so strong; wherein Thy greater art more clearly may be seen (Kitagaki 1981, 163)

194  Histories

Other poems, too, suggest that the translation is so good that the source text seems to be derived from it instead of the other way round, as in Jonson’s epigram on Joshua Sylvester’s version of Du Bartas (1605): Bartas doth wish thy English now were his […] As his will now be the translation thought, Thine the original (Kitagaki 1981, 118) Huygens’s poem on Jacob Westerbaen’s Dutch translation of the Aeneid (1660) notes that, if Virgil were alive today, he would want to translate Westerbaen’s version into Latin, which would produce a result far superior to the original Aeneid (1892–9, vol. 6, 288). James Wright’s verses on Dryden’s Aeneid (1697) also claim that ‘we know not which to call / The Imitation, which th’Originall’, for ‘such [is] the Majesty of your Impress / You seem the very Author you translate’ – to which he adds in the next stanza that ‘were [Virgil] now alive with us, […] Himself cou’d write no otherwise than thus’ (Kinsley and Kinsley 1971, 222–3). Of course, compliments of this kind need to be read in their rhetorical context. They present a deliberate inversion of the relation between translation and original as it is commonly perceived in critical treatises and in the translators’ own comments.

11.4 Treasure to be Shared by All Huygens’s cautious revaluation of translation (in the poem of 1633, above) opens the way for a very different set of images and metaphors bearing on the justification of translation. Broadly speaking, the translators and theorists use two lines of defence. They point out that, despite its apparent shortcomings, translation renders a useful service to the large number of people who do not read foreign languages. In addition, they continually restate that, while the odds may be stacked against it, translation is, after all, possible. The first argument, that translation serves the common good, implies a direct appeal by the translator to his audience and offers a counterweight to the images stressing the subordination and qualitative inferiority of the translation vis-à-vis its source text. The emphasis is on the useful, even essential role of translation in the dissemination of knowledge: it is translation that opens doors, that brings light and enlightenment for all and not just for the select few; in other words, translation performs a public function. The argument derives its strength from the steadily growing size of the market for translations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the early Renaissance, the defenders of writing in the vernacular and the defenders of translating into the vernacular both refer to the Biblical saying that ‘no man lyghteth a candle to cover it with a bushel’ (for instance, Thomas Elyot in 1541 and Thomas Phaer in 1544; Jones 1953, 49).

Images of Translation  195

Some translators go so far as to claim that not to translate amounts to withholding something valuable from the people. As early as 1475, the German translator Heinrich Stainhöwel says that he has engaged in translation to ensure that those without Latin ‘should not be deprived of something so good’ (Vanderheyden 1980, 147). Noting the scarcity of Dutch translations from the Latin, the Flemish publisher Jan Gymnick, in the preface (1541) to an anonymous translation of Livy, thinks it disgraceful that ’so many costly and profitable treasures have been withheld, indeed stolen from the common man’ (Vanderheyden 1980, 142). Even those who justify their work in less emotional language make the same point over and over again. The metaphors are those of providing access, unlocking, uncovering, removing obstacles, bringing into view. Nicholas Grimald’s statement, in the preface to his version of Cicero (1556), is as representative as any: chiefly for our unlatined people I have made this latine writer, english: and have now brought into light, that from them so longe was hidden: and have caused an auncient writing to become, in maner, newe agayne: and a boke, used but of fewe, to waxe common to a great meany: so that our men, understanding, what a treasure is amonge them […] may, in all pointes of good demeanour, becomme pereless. (Vanderheyden 1980, 144) William Painter’s dedication of his Second Tome of the Palace of Pleasure (1567) puts it in more general terms. Translators, he says, implore those paines, that no Science lurke in a corner, that no knowledge be shut up in cloisters, that no Historie remain under the maske and unknowne attire of other tongues. ( Jones 1953, 44) The preface to the Authorised Version of the Bible (1611) is even more emphatic and lyrical: Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtaine, that we may looke into the most Holy place; that remooveth the cover of the well, that wee may come by the water (Pollard 1911, 349) In many cases, the point is given additional emphasis by referring to the rich treasures which translators deliver to all, making it appropriate to cast them as discoverers returning from distant shores or as diggers for gold. Thomas Sebillet’s Art poétique (above) spoke of the translator as one who ‘extracts the hidden treasure from the bowels of the earth in order to put it to common

196  Histories

use’. Ben Jonson’s complimentary poem on George Chapman combines the image of the valuable treasure with that of the translator as discoverer ( Jonson 1963, 369), and T.G., writing in Barten Holyday’s Persius (1616), is equally metaphorical: What lay imprisoned, and confin’d alone Only to deeper apprehension; Thy more benigne, sublim’d, transcendent wit Hath reacht, and conquer’d, and imparted it. (Steiner 1970, 61) Both of these last two poems are laudatory pieces, and their imagery is a direct continuation of that found in critical handbooks and the translators’ own prefaces. Their role, in this context, is simply to confirm, or perhaps to intensify, the translators’ own self-defence.

11.5 Decanting, Translatability and Metempsychosis A fairly large number of prefaces and dedications describe the translation in question as a jewel in a rough casket – the casket being the language of the translation and the jewel representing the original content. The image can serve several purposes. It can be used as a justification for translating, in line with the image of the treasure worth having and now being shared with all. It is also used, as will be seen below, to express the possibility of translation per se: only the casket is changed, the jewel is preserved intact. When it occurs in the specific form of a jewel in a rough casket, it may be associated with the ‘rough garment’ metaphor, for both imply the admission of a certain loss incurred in the process of translation, with the proviso that the loss is no more than superficial and does not affect the substance of the original. The address to the reader in Abraham Fleming’s translation of Aelian’s Register of Histories (1576) makes the point in a very fulsome manner; the book, he says, is like unto an inestimable Iuell, or precious pearle, which although yt be enclosed in a homly wodden box, and shut up in a simple casket, little or nothing worth in comparison, yet it is never, a whit the lesse in value notwithstanding, but reserveth his price undiminished […] Open this base boxe, and lifte upp the lydd of this course casket, wherein so riche and costly a Iuell is enclosed. (Lathrop 1933, 79–80) The garment and the jewel metaphors are combined in Arthur Golding’s preface to his Histories of Trogus Pompeius (1564), which first contrasts the ‘playne and homespun English cote’ with the original ‘Romayne vesture’ and then goes on to claim that

Images of Translation  197

the valewe and estimacion of Thistory, is no more abased thereby, then should the vertue of a precious stone, by setting it in brasse or yron, or by carrying it in a closur of Leather. ( Jones 1953, 20) In both these cases, and in other similar statements, the implication is that translation is a matter of changing merely the outward form, not the substance, of the source text and that the loss is negligible. The underlying idea, the view of language in which form and substance, words and meaning, can be separated, finds expression in a series of metaphorical oppositions revolving around the notions of outside versus inside, or visible versus invisible or hidden, such as body and soul, matter and spirit, garment and body, casket and jewel, husk and kernel, the vessel and the liquid contained in it and a chest and its contents. The strength of this conception of language, and the specific form in which it appears in the metatexts of early modern translation, may perhaps be explained with reference to the tradition of Biblical interpretation and of medieval allegorical reading, but such ramifications would lead us far afield. The fact that some of the metaphorical oppositions just mentioned can also have slightly different applications – for example, garment as verse form (Harington) or as metre (Chapman) – need not concern us here either. The point at issue is that the conception of language in terms of outside versus inside implies the possibility of translation by separating form from meaning and granting priority to the latter. This is indeed how Erasmus sees it: Language consists of two parts, namely word and meaning which are like body and soul. If both can be rendered, I do not object to word-for-word translation. If they cannot, it would be preposterous for a translator to keep the words and to deviate from the meaning. (Schwartz 1955, 155) Charles Estienne’s preface to his translation of Terence’s Andria (1542) describes the translator as ‘one who renders the meaning, the expression, the spirit of a given matter without constraint of language’.25 As late as 1654, a poem by Huygens sums up just about all the stock metaphors for the opposition between poor outside and rich inside (body/soul, skin/body, casket/jewel, husk/kernel) in order to demonstrate that translation, despite its shortcomings, is, nevertheless, able to preserve the essence and that it is the rich inside, not the rough and ready outside, that matters (Huygens 1892–9, vol. 5, 122–3). From an early stage onward, however, this unproblematic notion of translatability is countered by an awareness that the idiomatic structures of individual languages do not always match and that these differences may hamper the transference of content. A typical metaphor presents translation as pouring something from one vessel into another. Its origin may lie in the Latin term transfundere (to

198  Histories

decant) for ‘to translate’. The term is used, among others, by Juan Luis Vives early in the sixteenth century (Vanderheyden 1980, 133). It is rarely used without suggesting that decanting can be done without spilling or loss of quality to the content. John Healey’s ‘To the Reader’, prefaced to his translation of Theophrastus (1616), admits that ‘by powring it out of the Latin into the vulgar, the great disproportion of Languages and abilities considered, it cannot but (by my unskilfulnesse) it hath taken some wind’ (Lathrop 1933, 264). In the dedication of his Electra translation (1639), Vondel complains that the content has suffered due to the constraints of rhyme and metre, as ‘pouring something from one language into another through a narrow bottle-neck cannot be done without spilling’.26 James Howell also uses the image in connection with translation (Steiner 1975, 146), and his French translator Jean Baudoin explains that translating is like decanting wine: some bouquet and quality is always lost.27 Sir Richard Fanshawe employs the image in the same sense in the dedication of his translation of the Pastor Fido (Stanton and Simeone 1964, 4). When John Denham subsequently uses it in the preface to his Destruction of Troy (1656), he strikes a somewhat different note. To him, Poesie is of no subtile a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum, there being certain Graces and Happinesses peculiar to every Language, which give life and energy to the words. (Steiner 1975, 65) Here, the metaphor has become problematic, for Denham makes it clear that, because of the ‘certain Graces and Happinesses peculiar to every Language’, poetry will evaporate completely if simply poured from one language into another without some compensatory effort on the translator’s part. The metaphor opens up a new perspective in that it ostensibly derives from the world of alchemy. Caput mortuum is the term used by alchemists for the residue left after a process of distillation, and its symbol is a skull (Crosland 1962, 228). The implication is, presumably, that translating poetry is rather more than pouring a liquid. It is a complex and delicate process requiring artistic input by the translator and resulting in a product of a different nature from what it was before. Denham does not enlarge on what he means by ‘Poesie’, but one is reminded of Du Bellay’s open-ended catalogue of formal and conceptual attributes that, together, make up artistic quality and which he sums up in the Latin term genius.28 The view that poetry, as an artistic quality, is composed of both formal and conceptual properties undercuts the simple dichotomies implied in the inside versus outside metaphors of language. The increasingly problematic nature of literary translation, as the libertine translators of the mid-seventeenth century see it, is captured in the way John Denham bends a metaphor that was originally intended to express the possibility of translation to focus instead on the

Images of Translation  199

threatened loss of the essential ‘poetic spirit’ in the transfer. For the French translators of the belles infidèles school, the garment metaphor becomes problematic in the same way and because of a similar perception of the inseparability of form and content, of a writer’s stylistic ‘tour’ and his ‘pensée’ (Zuber 1963, 291). It is then also in this context that we can see the repeated insistence with which Dryden uses the word ‘genius’ when he speaks of translation in his prefaces and essays: translating poetry is a matter of preserving the ‘genius’ of the original, and the translator should possess a ‘genius’ akin to that of his author. The shift in the approach to the translation of literature is anticipated in George Chapman’s prefaces to his translation of Homer (1610–16). Just as the ‘sense and elegancie’ of different languages is bound up with their linguistic structure, so, too, are the poet’s ‘spirit’ and his ‘art’ inseparable from the form in which they are expressed. Chapman advises translators to aspire As well to reach the spirit that was spent In his example as with arte to pierce His Grammar, and etymologie of words. (Spingarn 1908, 77) Hence also his rejection both of ‘word-for-word traductions’ which sacrifice the ‘free grace’ of the original and of taking ‘more license from the words than may express / Their full compression’ (ibid.: 77, 78). The proper solution is to strive ‘with Poesie to open Poesie’ (ibid.), in other words, to attempt to produce an equivalent poetic effect. It is this notion of equivalent poetic effect that will appeal to certain translators in England and France a few decades later. John Denham praises it in Richard Fanshawe’s Pastor Fido (1648) when he contrasts Fanshawe with the literal translators: ‘They but preserve the Ashes, thou the Flame, / True to his sense, but truer to his fame’ (Steiner 1975, 64). In the preface to his Destruction of Troy, Denham puts it even more directly when he says of the translator that ‘it is not his business alone to translate Language into Language, but Poesie into Poesie’ (Steiner 1975, 65); the echo from Chapman is too obvious to be missed. Abraham Cowley’s endeavour to render Pindar’s ‘way and manner of speaking’ rather than ‘precisely what he spoke’ (Steiner 1975, 67) puts the emphasis squarely on poetic style and eloquence rather than on content. In France, Perrot d’Ablancourt’s preface to his first translation, the Octavius of Minucius Felix (1637), makes a very similar point, claiming that ‘[t]wo works resemble each other more if they are both eloquent than if one is eloquent and the other is not’; in the same paragraph, he unwittingly echoes Chapman in observing that different languages have different ‘beauties and graces’ so that a compensatory effort is required on the translator’s part.29 The preface to the second part of his Tacitus translation (1644) repeats that ‘the way to arrive at the greatness of the original is not to follow it step by step, but to seek out the beauties of the

200  Histories

language [of the translation] just as the original author sought out the beauties of his language’.30 The changed conception of the priorities of translation, and the agreement between the advocates of the ‘new way of translating’ in France and England, is also apparent from some of their metaphors. While, for example, Denham speaks of an unpoetic translation as a ‘Caput mortuum’, Perrot d’Ablancourt repeatedly refers to a translation which lacks eloquence as a ‘carcass’ (Minucius Felix, 1637; Thucydides, 1662; Perrot d’Ablancourt 1972, 111, 202). In the preface to Sylvae (1685), Dryden, too, remarks that ‘a good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation than his carcass would be to his living body’ (Dryden 1962, vol. ii, 20). Metaphors like these appear to crystallise the new attitude toward literary translation. They also show the extent to which the ‘libertine’ translators have moved away from the traditional discourse on translation and toward the metalanguage of imitation. Instead of – and sometimes in addition to – the conventional images of subordination and inferiority, the translators and theorists who adopt the new approach either devise new metaphors that suggest a direct personal relationship between translator and author, or they turn toward the traditional metaphors of imitation. Cowley’s resolve to ‘shoot beyond the Mark’, for example, belongs in the sphere of the eristic metaphors of imitation. In Chapman’s view of the translator’s task, the close familiarity with the author’s artistic personality is very much in evidence: the translator should be alert to all the qualities of the source text, and through spiritual affinity with his author and a process of internalisation, he should assess the writer’s ‘true sense and height’ and then set out in search of an equivalent poetic expression. No doubt Chapman would have approved of Marie de Gournay’s attitude – and imagery – when she observes, in 1623, that to translate is to engender a Work anew […]. Engender, I say, because [the ancient writers] have to be decomposed by profound and penetrating reflection, so as to be reconstituted by a similar process; just as meat must be decomposed in our stomachs in order to form our bodies.31 The digestive analogy, like Du Bellay’s metaphor in his Deffence et illustration, comes straight out of the sphere of imitation. Chapman would probably also have agreed with Guillaume Colletet’s statement, in a speech to the French Academy in 1636, that we should write in such a way that we are not a mere Echo of the words [of the Ancients]; we should conceive things in the same spirit in which they conceived them, and search in our language, as they did in theirs, for terms capable of an exalted and magnificent expression32 and with the advice of Franciscus Junius (François du Jon) in 1637 that we should not ‘ape the outward ornaments but express above all the inner force of the

Images of Translation  201

[original] work’ (Warners 1957, 85). The point is, however, that both Colletet and Junius are referring not to translation but to imitation; both are rehearsing Quintilian’s remark that ‘imitation […] should not be confined merely to words’ (1922, 89). In this view, the translator’s wish to absorb, in its entirety, the ‘spirit’ of the original work makes for a sense of respectful admiration and a close person-toperson relationship rather than the submissiveness of the traditional translators. Consequently, the translators who take this approach cast themselves as caring friends, companions or hosts, concerned for their author’s well-being. The Earl of Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684) tells the translator to chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend: United by this Sympathetic Bond, You grow familiar, intimate and fond. (Steiner 1975, 77) Perrot d’Ablancourt’s emphasis on ‘eloquence’ in the translated text is invariably justified in terms of the need to preserve the original author’s integrity, in a very personal sense. Guez de Balzac’s comment on Perrot d’Ablancourt’s version of Xenophon, in a letter to Valentin Conrart dated 25 April 1648, captures the new spirit: How grateful I am to him [Perrot d’Ablancourt] for the services rendered in Paris to the good people of Athens! These are not the marks of inferiority or tasks performed out of servility; they are acts of courtesy, acts of pure hospitality!33 It is also this personal relationship, the notion of spiritual affinity and the translator’s sense of responsibility as if to a respected friend, that prompts translators to make their authors speak as the authors would have spoken had they lived in the translator’s day and age. In his Discourse sur Malherbe (1630), Antoine Godeau states that the best translators in France have always written as if they were animated by the spirit of those they explain to us […] and they make them speak with such charm as if they had never breathed any other air but that of the Louvre.34 John Denham, likewise, holds, in 1656, that ‘if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this Age’ (Steiner 1975, 65). Interestingly, Dryden’s changing view of translation and imitation is reflected in his statements on this point. In the preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), he refers to Abraham Cowley’s practice as imitation rather than translation on account of the latter’s endeavour ‘to write, as he supposes that author would have done, had he lived in our day and age, and in our country’

202 

Histories

(Dryden 1962, vol. 1, 270). In the ‘Discourse Concerning Satire’ (1962), which criticises the literal versions of Barten Holyday and Robert Stapylton, he says that he and his fellow translators ‘endeavoured to make [ Juvenal] speak that kind of English which he would have spoken had he lived in England, and had written to this age’ (1962, vol. 2, 154). Finally, in the dedication to his Aeneid (1697) – in which he ‘thought fit to steer betwixt the two extremes of paraphrase and literal translation’ – he has tried ‘to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age’ (1962, vol. 2, 247). Considering the extent to which the libertine translators had, in previous decades, been moving in the direction of imitation, however, the shifts in Dryden’s position are less surprising than they may seem. As early as 1648, Edward Sherburne’s preface to his Medea is undecided whether to call the version a translation or a paraphrase (Steiner 1970, 70). Cowley is equally indifferent to whether his Pindarique Odes should be termed translation or imitation (Steiner 1975, 67). Perrot d’Ablancourt declares in the preface to his version of Lucian (1654) that it ‘is not properly Translation, but it is better than Translation’,35 and, in a letter written shortly afterward to the much stricter translator François Cassandre, he repeats that his own work ‘cannot properly bear the name of translation, but there is no other’.36 The close bond between translator and author as suggested in the digestive images, the close personal relationship and the endeavour to write as the author would have done had that author lived here and now, ultimately results in the identification of the translator with his or her author. The necessary empathy between them, and the translator’s absorption of the model, becomes a merging of identities. The supreme image for this transformation is the Pythagorean notion – occasionally acknowledged as such – of metempsychosis, or the migration of souls. George Chapman describes his sense of spiritual communion with Homer in the allegorical poem ‘Euthymiae Raptus’ (1609), in which the poet tells the translator that thou didst inherit My true sense (for the time then) in my spirit; And I, invisiblie, went prompting thee, To these fayre Greenes, where thou didst english me. (Kitagaki 1981, 132) The later translators and theorists take the idea to its logical conclusion. In the preface to his translation of Thucydides (1662), Perrot d’Ablancourt observes, daringly, that this is not so much a portrait of Thucydides, as Thucydides himself, who has passed into another body as if by a kind of Metempsychosis; he was Greek but has become French.37

Images of Translation  203

Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684) tells us, likewise, that the ‘Sympathetick Bond’ between translator and author should be such that, in the end, the translator is ‘No Longer his Interpreter, but He’ (Steiner 1975, 77). At this stage, finally, the discourse of the libertine translators meets the rhetoric of the commendatory poems on translation. Again and again, the laudatory verses praise translators for having rendered their authors so well that the success of the operation must be attributed to some miraculous migration of souls or at least a unique affinity. As early as 1577, Ronsard’s poem on the Iliade of Amadis Jamyn argues that just as Homer was filled with Jupiter’s spirit in writing his epic, so Homer’s soul has passed into Jamyn, and now ‘You are both one, in one body united / Heaven is your common father’.38 Needless to say, a translation produced in such circumstances reads like an original. The poem by T.G. on Barten Holyday’s Persius (1616) claims that Holyday has written As if thou didst consult with th’Author’s Ghost; Such height, such sacred indignation As seemes a Persius, no translation. (Steiner 1970, 61) Similarly, Ben Jonson’s epigram on Henry Savile’s translation of Tacitus (1591) begins with the lines: If, my religion safe, I durst embrace That stranger doctrine of Pythagoras, I should beleeve, the soule of Tacitus In thee, most weighty Savile, liv’d to us ( Jonson 1963, 42) Finally, two Dutch poems on two separate translations of Guillaume du Bartas make exactly the same point. J.J. Starter, writing on the version by Zacharias Heyns (1621), refers explicitly to Pythagoras’s notion of metempsychosis, for it is only, he says, by assuming that ‘Du Bartas’ soul has passed into our Heyns’ that can he comprehend the latter’s glorious achievement.39 And Anna Roemers Visscher, praising Baron Wessel van Boetselaer’s translation (1622), exclaims: Du Bartas lives! he writes! he calls me his friend, O noble Baron, his spirit resides in you (…) You are Du Bartas, or he was the same as you.40 The irony of these poems is that they were written independently of each other, for different translators, both of whom could apparently pride themselves on possession of the French poet’s soul. As we saw, the rhetoric of the complimentary poem consistently inverts the images of subordination and inferiority pertaining to the traditional

204 

Histories

metalanguage of translation, and instead upgrades the judgements on the use and value of translation. It is a measure of the distance travelled by the ‘libertine’ school of translators, and of their remarkable self-confidence, that their views on the translation of literary texts eventually led them by a different route to an almost identical position. Thinking the complex nature of literary language and literary translation through to its conclusion, they arrived at a point which, for the stricter practitioners of the genre, existed only in the hyperbolic language of the laudatory mode.

Notes 1 ‘La plus vraie espèce d’Imitation, c’est de traduire. Car imiter n’est autre chose que vouloir faire ce que fait un autre: Ainsi que fait le Traducteur qui s’asservit non seulement à l’Invention d’autrui, mais aussi à la Disposition: et encore à l’Elocution tant qu’il peut’ (Peletier 1930, 105). [I have modernised Peletier’s eccentric spelling, TH.] All translations are my own. 2 ‘Et qui pourrait traduire tout Virgile en vers français, phrase pour phrase et mot pour mot: ce serait une louange inestimable […] Puis, pensez quelle grandeur ce serait de voir une seconde Langue répondre à toute l’élégance de la première et encore avoir la sienne propre. Mais comme j’ai dit, il ne se peut faire’ (Peletier 1930, 110–11). 3 ‘Pourtant t’averty-ie que la Version ou Traduction est auiourdhuy le Poëme plus frequent et mieux receu des estimez Poëtes et des doctes lecteurs […]. Et luy [the translator] est deue la mesme gloire qu’emporte celuy qui par son labeur et longue peine tire des entrailles de la terre le tresor caché, pour le faire commun à l’usage de tous les hommes’ (Sebillet 1972, 73). 4 ‘[C]este energie, et ne scay quel esprit, […] que les Latins appelleroient genius. Toutes les quelles choses se peuvent autant exprimer en traduisant, comme un peintre peut representer l’ame avecques le cors de celuy qu’il entreprent après le naturel’ (Du Bellay 1948, 40–41). 5 ‘We lose [the author’s] spirit, when we think to take his body. The grosser part remains with us, but the soul is flown away in some noble expression, or some delicate turn of words or thought. Thus Holyday, who made this way his choice, seized the meaning of Juvenal; but the poetry has always escaped him’ (‘A Discourse Concerning … Satire’, Dryden 1962, vol. 2, 153). 6 ‘Immitant les meilleurs auteurs Grecz, se transformant en eux, les devorant, et après les avoir bien digerez, les convertissant en sang et nourriture’ (Du Bellay 1948, 42). 7 ‘We ought not to regard a good imitation as a theft, but as a beautiful idea of him who undertakes to imitate […]; for he enters into the lists like a new wrestler, to dispute the prize with the former champion. This sort of emulation, says Hesiod, is honourable […] – when we combat for victory with a hero, and are not without glory even in our overthrow’ (Dryden 1962, vol. 1, 242). 8 ‘Je sai bien que je n’ai point esgalé l’élégance de vostre stile latin; mais j’ai eu tellement peur d’affoiblir vos argumens en m’esloignant de vos paroles, que je les ai suivi [sic] de près par tout, autant que la propriété de nostre langue l’a peu permettre’ (Zuber 1968, 261). 9 ‘Wy hebben het Latijn niet al te dicht willen op de hielen volgen, noch oock te verre van onzen treffelijcken voorganger afwijcken. Maer of wy hier in de rechte maete houden, dat zal het Groote Vernuft […] kunnen oordeelen’ (Vondel 1927–-40, vol. 3, 435). 10 ‘[D]at wy zoetelijcker hadden mogen vloeijen zoo wy ons niet naeuwer aenden texst wilden binden’ (Vondel 1927–-40, vol. 2, 229). 11             [C]’est une peine Qui grand travail et peu d’honeur ameine (Car quoy que face ung parfaict traducteur Tousjours l’honeur retourne a l’inventeur) (Weinberg 1950, 128). 12 ‘un labeur miserable, ingrat et esclave’ (Zuber 1968, 24).

Images of Translation  205

13 ‘Nu Lopes zijt te vreen En volght met fluxe schreen Uw’ winnaar, die met uw’ het lof Sal delen, van ‘t verwarde Hof. O! Vega uw’ verblijt Die sijn gevanghen zijt Door krijghs-recht, dat hy rechtevoort Uw’ deelt ‘t geen hem heel toebehoort’ (De Fuyter 1647, no page). 14 ‘Tis een’ geleende vreughd / Daer ik u op onthael; maer leengoed is oock goed goed, (…) dit’s een leen van edel’ menschen geesten’ (Huygens 1892–9, vol. 4, 206). 15 ‘Le tiers poinct est qu’en traduisant il ne se fault pas asservir jusques à là que l’on rende mot pour mot’ (Weinberg 1950, 81–82). 16 ‘Si, en quelques autres lieux, j’ai ajouté et retranché quelque chose, […] j’ai fait le premier pour éclaircir des obscurités qui eussent donné de la peine à des gens qui n’en veulent point; et le second pour ne tomber en des répétitions ou autres impertinences dont sans doute un esprit délicat se fût offensé […]; mais je n’ai pas voulu faire les grotesques qu’il est impossible d’éviter quand on se restreint à la servitude de traduire mot à mot’ (Ladborough 1938–39, 85). 17 ‘Ce seroit une superstition Judaïque de s’attacher aux mots et de quitter le dessein pour lequel on les employe. D’ailleurs ce ne sont pas les paroles d’un Dieu, pour avoir tant de peur de les perdre’ (Perrot d’Ablancourt 1972, 111). 18 ‘Par tout ailleurs je l’ay suivy pas à pas, et plutost en esclave qu’en compagnon; quoy que peutestre je me pûsse donner plus de liberté; puisque je ne traduis pas un passage, mais un Livre, de qui toutes les parties doivent estre unies ensemble, et comme fonduës en un mesme corps’ (Perrot d’Ablancourt 1972, 120–21). 19 ‘Car de moy je ne suys que son simple truchement fidele pour certain autant qui m’a esté possible, mais non suffisament exercité en l’un et l’aultre langaige pour me debviour paragonner à luy’ (Weinberg 1950, 75). 20 ‘Het luste ons hem, die als een arent op gaet streven / In zyne schaduw, laegh langs d’aerde, naer te zweven, / Van ver te volgen, op een’ Nederduitschen trant’ (Vondel 1927–40, vol. 7, 377). 21 ‘[I]e n’auray peut-estre donné à nostre Reine que de fausses perles et de petits morceaux de cristal au lieu de diamants’ (Leiner 1965, 455). 22 ‘Mais, Sire, […] ayez s’il vous plaist souvenance de ce que Themistocles dist au roy des Perses, lequel vouloit parler à luy des affaires de la guerre par truchement et interprete. Auquel fist response (luy monstrant l’envers d’une tapisserie) que telle estoit l’interpretation d’un langaige comme l’envers d’un tapiz. […] Semblablement vous, Sire, ayez estime que par la mienne translation je n’ay pouvoir de vous monstrer aultre chose que l’envers de la triumphante et excellente tapisserie de Sophocles’ (Weinberg 1950, 74). 23 ‘’Tswart geeft het wit syn lyf, de doncker maeckt het klaer. En wat waer Maneschijn, wanneer ‘tgeen nacht en waer? Of, dunckt u ‘tHollandsch swart het Engelsch witt te decken, Noch komt u ‘tswart te baet. ‘Khebb lamper-doeck sien trecken Voor ooghen die ‘tgeweld van somer-sonne-schijn Niet uijt en konden staen’ (Huygens 1982-9, vol. 4, 207). 24 ‘’T vertaelde scheelt soo veel van ‘t Onvertaelde dicht, Als lijf en schaduwen: en schaduwen zijn nachten. Maer uw’ bescheidenheid en maghse niet verachten; Tzijn edel’ Iofferen, ‘tzijn dochteren van ‘tlicht. En schaduwen zijn scheef, als ‘taensicht inde Maen: Soo dese dichten oock: maer, magh ick ‘tselver seggen, Gelyck aen schaduwen die lamm ter aerde leggen, Men sieter noch wat trecks van ‘trechte wesen aen. En schaduwen zijn swart en duijster in te sien: Soo dese dichten oock: Maer ‘tzijn gemeene ooghen

206  Histories

Die door het swacke swart van schad’wen niet en moghen: Wat schaduw soud’ den dagh aen Tessels oogh verbien? En schaduwen zijn koel, en op haer heetste lauw: Soo dese dichten oock: maer ‘tkoel en is maer korst-koelt’: ‘tVier schuylt’er in, gelijck’t in ‘s minnaers koele borst woelt, En peper is niet heet voor datme’r tvier uyt knauw’. En schaduwen zijn, niet; dat’s droomen bij den dagh: Soo dese dichten oock: maer ‘tzijn gelijfde Nietten: En slaet ghij ‘tvoetsel nae daer uijt mijn’ droomen schieten, ‘K hadd pitt en mergh geslockt eer ickse droomd’ en sagh (Huygens 1892–9, vol. 2, 26–8). 25 ‘ung traducteur, tel que les Graecz appelloient paraphraste (c’est-à-dire, qui rend le sense, la phrase, et l’esprit d’une matiere sans contrainte du langaige)’ (Weinberg 1950, 90). 26 ‘Rijm en maet, waer aen de vertolcker gebonden staet, verhindert oock menighmael, dat de vertaelder niet zoo wel en volmaecktelijck naspreeckt, ‘t geen zoo wel en heerlijck vóórgesproken word; en yet van d’eene tael in d’ander, door eenen engen hals te gieten, gaet zonder plengen niet te werck’ (Vondel 1927–40, vol. 3, 642–3). 27 ‘comme du vin que l’on tire de son premier vaisseau; d’où si on le verse dans des bouteilles, quelque soin qu’on y apporte, il ne laisse pas de s’affoiblir, à cause que ses esprits s’evaporent, et se dissipent insensiblement’ (Zuber 1968, 88). 28 ‘à cause de ceste divinité d’invention qu’ilz [the poets] ont plus que les autres, de ceste grandeur de style, magnificence de motz, gravité de sentences, audace et variété de figures, et mil’ autres lumieres de poësie: bref ceste energie, et ne scay quel espirit, qui est en leurs ecriz, que les Latins appelleroient genius’ (Du Bellay 1948, 40). 29 ‘Et du reste je croy que deux ouvrages sont plus semblables quand ils sont tout deux eloquens, que quand l’un est éloquent et que l’autre ne l’est point […] Et après tout ce n’est rendre un Autheur qu’à demy, que de luy retrancher son eloquence. Comme il a esté agreable en sa langue, il faut qu’il le soit encore en la nostre, et d’autant que les beautez et les graces sont differentes, nous ne devons point craindre de luy donner celles de nostre pays, puis que nous luy ravissons les siennes’ (Perrot d’Ablancourt 1972, 110–1). 30 ‘[L]e moyen d’arriver à la glorie de son original, n’est pas de le suivre pas à pas, mais de chercher les beautez de la langue, comme il a fait celles de la sienne’ (Perrot d’Ablancourt 1972, 128). 31 ‘[E]ngendrer une Œuvre de nouveau […]. Engendrer, dis-je, parce-qu’ […] il faut deffaire [the original author] par une cogitation profonde et penetrante, afin de le refaire par une autre pareille: tout ainsi qu’il faut que la viande meure et se defface en nostre estomac, pour en composer nostre substance’ (Zuber 1963, 292). 32 ‘de telle facon, que l’on ne soit pas le simple Echo de leurs paroles; il faut concevoir les choses du mesme air qu’ils les eussent conceuës; et rechercher dans la langue, comme ils faisoient dans la leur, des termes capables d’une haute et magnifique expression’ (Zuber 1968, 75). 33 ‘Que je luy scay bon gré des offices qu’il rend à Paris aux honnetes gens d’Athenes! Ce ne sont pas des marques d’infériorité ny des debvoirs de subjetion; ce sont des effets de courtoisie; ce sont des actes de pure hospitalité!’ (Zuber 1963, 282). 34 ‘comme s’ils est estoient animez de l’espirit de ceux qu’ils nous expliquent […] et [les] font parler aussy agreablement que s’ils n’avoient jamais respiré un autre air que celuy du Louvre’ (Zuber 1968, 49). 35 ‘Cependant, cela n’est pas proprement de la Traduction; mais cela vaut mieux que la Traduction’ (Perrot d’Ablancourt 1972, 186). 36 ‘Je ne prétens donc point qu’elle [the translation of Lucian] vous serve de modèle, elle n’est pas assez exacte pour cela, et ne peut porter le nom de traduction qu’improprement, et parce qu’on ne peut lui en donner d’autre’ (Hennebert 1864, 180). 37 ‘Car ce n’est pas tant icy le portrait de Thucydide, que Thucydide luy mesme, qui est passé dans un autre corps comme par une espece de Metempsycose, et de Grec est devenu François’ (Perrot d’Ablancourt 1972, 202). 38 ‘En toy [Homer] Jupiter transformé Composa l’œuvrage estimé

Images of Translation  207

De l’Iliade et l’Odissee, Et tu as ton ame passee En Jamyn pour interpreter Les vers qu’en toy fit Jupiter […] Tous deux en un corps n’estes qu’un, Le ciel vous est pere commun’(Carrington 1974, 128). 39 ‘Wie sou dit wonderwerck my andersins verklaren, Als dat sijn siel sou sijn in onsen HEYNS gevaren? En dat hy in hem werckt, en dat hy in hem sweeft In Nederland, als hy in Vranckrijck heeft geleeft? […] O bondigh Nederland! hoe seer sijt ghy verbonden Aen d’Hemel, mits hy u heeft BARTAS Geest gesonden, Bekleed in t’Edel lijf van ZACHARIAS HEYNS’ (Starter 1864, 298–9). 40 ‘Du Bartas leeft! hy schrijft! hy noemt my sijn vriendinne O edel Heer Baron, in u soo rust sijn geest: Want sonder die en wast niet moog’lijck aen te halen Sijn Boeck in suyver duytsch soo aerdigh te vertalen, Ghy zijt het selfs, of hy heeft u gelijck geweest’ (Roemers Visscher 1881, vol. 2, 109).

Bibliography Amos, Flora Ross. 1920. Early Theories of Translation. New York: Columbia University Press. Du Bellay, Joachim. 1948. La deffense et illustration de la langue francoyse. Edited by Henri Chamard. Paris: Didier. Carrington, Samuel M. 1974. ‘Amadis Jamyn, Translator of Homer’. Kentucky Romance Quarterly 21, Supplement 2 (French Renaissance Studies in Honor of Isidore Silver), 123–36. Crosland, Maurice. 1962. Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry. London: Heinemann. Curtius, Ernst Robert. 1953. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by Willard R. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dryden, John. 1962. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays. Edited by G. Watson. 2 vols. London & New York: Dent & Dutton. Fuyter, Lion de. 1647. Lope de Vega Carpioos Verwerde-Hof. Gerijmt in Nederduytse vaarzen door L.D. Fuyter. Amsterdam: Johannes Jacot. Gmelin, H. 1932. ‘Das Prinzip der Imitatio in den romanischen Literaturen der Renaissance’. Romanische Forschungen 46, 83–360. Guillerm, Luce. 1980. ‘L’auteur, les modèles et le pouvoir, ou la topique de la traduction au XVIe siècle en France’. Revue des Sciences Humaines 52, 5–31. Hennebert, Frédéric. 1864. Histoire des traductions françaises d’auteurs grecs et latins pendant le XVIe et le XVIIe siècle. Bruxelles: Th. Lesigne. Huygens, Constantijn. 1892–99. De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens, naar zijn handschrift uitgegeven. Edited by J.A. Worp. 9 vols. Groningen: J.B. Wolters. Huygens, Constantijn. 1911–17. De briefwisseling van Constantijn Huygens (1608–1687). Edited by J.A. Worp. 6 vols. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Jones, Richard Foster. 1953. The Triumph of the English Language. A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration. London: G. Cumberlege & Oxford University Press. Jonson, Ben. 1963. The Complete Poetry. Edited by W.B. Hunter. New York: New York University Press. Kinsley, James and Helen Kinsley, ed. 1971. Dryden: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

208  Histories

Kitagaki, Muneharu. 1981. Principles and Problems of Translation in Seventeenth-Century England. Kyoto: Yamagushi Shoten. Ladborough, R.W. 1938–9. ‘Translation from the Ancients in Seventeenth-Century France’. Journal of the Walburg Institute 2, 85–104. Lathrop, Henry Burrowes. 1933. Translation from the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman, 1477–1620. Madison: Wisconsin University Press. Leiner, Wolfgang. 1965. Der Widmungsbrief in der französischen Literatur (1580–1715). Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Matthiesen, F.O. 1931. Translation: An Elizabethan Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nugent, Elisabeth M., ed. 1956. The Thought and Culture of the English Renaissance: An Anthology of Tudor Prose 1481–1555. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Sullivan, Maurice J. 1980. ‘Running Division on the Groundwork: Dryden’s Theory of Translation’. Neophilologus 64, 155–9. Peletier du Mans, Jacques. 1930. Art poétique. Edited by A. Boulanger. Paris: Belles lettres. Perrot d’Ablancourt, Nicholas. 1972. Lettres et prefaces critiques. Edited by Roger Zuber. Paris: Didier. Pigman, G.W. 1980. ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’. Renaissance Quarterly 33, 1–32. Pollard, Alfred. 1911. Records of the English Bible: The Documents Relating to the Translation and Publication of the Bible in English, 1525–1611. London & Oxford: H. Frowde & Oxford University Press. Quintilian. 1922. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian in Four Volumes. Translated by H.E. Butler. London & New York: Heinemann & Putnam’s Sons. Roemers Visscher, Anna. 1881. Alle de gedichten. Edited by Nicolaas Beets. 2 vols. Utrecht: J.L. Beijers. Schwarz, Werner. 1944. ‘Translation into German in the Fifteenth Century’. Modern Language Review 39, 368–73. Schwarz, Werner. 1955. Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation. Some Reformation Controversies and their Backgrounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sebillet, Thomas. 1972. Art poetique françoys. Genève: Slatkine Reprints. Spingarn, J.E., ed. 1908. Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. Stackelberg, Jürgen von. 1956. ‘Das Bienengleichnis. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der literarischen Imitatio’. Romanische Forschungen 68, 271–93. Stanley, Thomas. 1962. The Poems and Translations. Edited by G.M. Crump. Oxford: Clarendon. Stanton, W.F. and W.E. Simeone, ed. 1964. A Critical Edition of Sir Richard Fanshawe’s 1647 Translation of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s ‘Il Pastor Fido’. Oxford: Clarendon. Starter, J.J. 1864. Friesche Lusthof. Edited by J. van Vloten. Utrecht: L.E. Bosch. Steiner, T.R. 1970. ‘Precursors to Dryden: English and French Theories of Translation in the Seventeenth Century’. Comparative Literature Studies 7, 50–80. Steiner, T.R. 1975. English Translation Theory 1650–1800. Assen & Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. Vanderheyden, J.F. 1979. ‘Verkenningen in vroeger vertaalwerk 1450–1600. “Ghenuechlijck ende oock profijtelijck”’. Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 149–83. Vanderheyden, J.F. 1980. ‘Verkenningen in vroeger vertaalwerk 1450–1600. De “translatio doctrinae sapientaeque”’. Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Academic voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, 129–57.

Images of Translation  209

Vondel, Joost van den. 1927–40. De werken van Vondel. Edited by J.F.M. Sterck et al. 10 vols. Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek. Warners, J.D.P. 1957. ‘Translatio – Imitatio – Emulatio’ [part 2]. De niewe taalgids 49, 82–8. Weinberg, Bernard, ed. 1950. Critical Prefaces of the French Renaissance. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Zuber, Roger. 1963. ‘La création littéraire au dix-septième siècle: L’avis des théoriciens de la traduction’. Revue des Sciences Humaines, 111, 277–94. Zuber, Roger. 1968. Les ‘Belles Infidèles’ et la formation du goût classique. Perrot d’Ablancourt et Guez de Balzac. Paris: A. Colin.

12 THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR IN THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE Explorations in a Discursive Field [1997]

This is an exploratory essay, centred on a few interrelated terms, as they are used in connection with translation in sixteenth-century Western Europe. The starting point is the idea of the law of translation. Closely connected are such terms as the duty and the task of the translator, which denote what it is translators commit themselves to when they translate – what they must do to discharge their office or responsibility as translators. The main claim in the following pages is that, when the sixteenth-century discourse on translation speaks of the law of translation or of the translator’s duty, task, responsibility or ‘office’, these terms, as a rule, designate a form of literal or word-for-word translation. Literalism, that is, appears to constitute the law of translation. Even when literalism as the law of translation is not expected to be taken in any absolute or compelling sense, it remains powerfully present as an ideal, as a distant but appealing utopia, that which, in essence, translation ought to be or ought at least to aspire to be. Literalism embodies the dream of translatability as a matching of component parts without loss, excess or deviation. It is a dream at once enticing and exacting, for it demands the translator’s ascetic and humbling self-denial. In practice, various more or less pragmatic reasons may induce the individual translator to tone down the ideal or to retreat from it, but they cannot wholly extinguish its appeal. This is not to say that, even in theory, literalism reigns supreme. There are those who oppose the notion of literal translation on theoretical as well as on practical grounds. They draw support from the Humanist tradition and bring rhetorical standards as well as grammatical considerations into play. Their numbers increase, especially in the latter half of the sixteenth century. But in the very fact that, more often than not, they, too, attempt to separate translation from exegesis and, consequently, feel the need to make taxing demands on the translator, they can be seen to pay indirect homage to literalism as the innermost core DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-16

Task of the Renaissance Translator  211

and unattainable ideal of translation and as the translator’s most fundamental but impossible task. The literalist principle is not fully sidelined until the seventeenth century. The following paragraphs seek to gather evidence to support this claim. The materials do not consist of actual translations but of statements about translation, as we are looking at the way translation is perceived, conceptualised and theorised. Whether or to what extent the theoretical reflections have a bearing on the practice of translation in the period involves an additional set of issues that will not be addressed here. The present essay merely wants to interpret Renaissance concepts of translation using the notion of literalism as its cornerstone.

12.1 As our starting point, let us take two well-known French treatises on poetics from around the mid-sixteenth century. They both speak of the ‘law’ of translation. In Book I, Chapter 5, of his Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse (1549), Joachim du Bellay refers to all those admirable gems of eloquence, in prose and verse, that exploit the resources of a particular language in such a way that, he says, their charm and elegance cannot possibly be rendered by a translator. Add to this the idiomatic differences between languages, Du Bellay continues, and the result is that ‘observing the law of translating, which is not to stray beyond the limits set by the author, your diction will be constrained, cold, & lacking in elegance’ (‘observant la loy de traduyre, qui est n’espacier point hors des limites de l’aucteur, vostre diction sera contrainte, froide, & de mauvaise grace’; Du Bellay 1948, 36). For this reason, translation cannot contribute to linguistic refinement or enrichment, a conclusion Du Bellay draws, explicitly and aggressively, at the end of his next chapter.1 But what does Du Bellay mean when he speaks of ‘the law of translating’? The spatial imagery in the wording (‘espacier’; ‘limites’) leaves room for speculation regarding the precise extent of the translator’s leeway, but it is clear that ‘the law of translating’ implies confinement to a narrowly circumscribed space, so much so that it produces aesthetically unacceptable results. This is spelled out in the letter to Jean de Morel with which, some years later, Du Bellay prefaces his French version (for, despite his strictures, Du Bellay does translate) of the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. Appealing to ‘those who understand both the labour and the laws of translating’ (‘ceux qui entendent & la peine & les lois de traduire’), he points out the impossibility of conveying even the original author’s shadow if the translator is held to render everywhere ‘period for period, epithet for epithet, proper noun for proper noun, and finally saying neither more nor less, nor anything different’ (‘periode pour periode, epithete pour epithete, nom propre pour nom propre, & finablement dire ny plus ny moins, & non autrement’); he therefore feels he has honourably acquitted himself of his task (‘son devoir’) by translating in a freer, more compensatory vein (Du Bellay 1931, vol. 6, 249–50). The law of translating is

212 

Histories

evidently quite strict. It does not allow the translator to stray far from the words of the original. Both the way Du Bellay fills in the notion of the law of translation and the terms he used in the earlier Deffence et illustration to describe the unattractive effect of translations carried out according to this law – a diction deprived of eloquence and, hence, ‘constrained, cold, & lacking in elegance’ – resemble those employed elsewhere by other writers, in discussions unequivocally aimed at literal or word-for-word translation. A case in point would be Chapter 6, ‘Of Translations’ (‘Des traductions’), of Jacques Peletier du Mans’s Art poetique of 1555 (Peletier 1990, 262–5). Here, Peletier considers both the effects of literal translation and its utopia. Having explained, in marked contrast to Du Bellay, that the translator subjects himself (‘s’asservit’) not only to the inventio and the dispositio but also, as far as possible, to the elocutio of his author and that, in so doing, he rightfully earns for translation a place in the world of art (‘aient donc les Traductions place en notre Art, puisqu’elles se font par art’), he goes on to state that its ‘law’, however, is understood by few (‘que la loi en est entendue de peu de gens’). Peletier illustrates his point by offering a correct reading of the famous but, at the time, frequently misinterpreted fidus interpres passage in Horace’s Art of Poetry, a reading that has Horace indeed affirming that the faithful translator translates word-for-word (‘Et ne me peux assez ébahir de ceux, qui pour blâmer la traduction de mot à mot, se veulent aider de l’autorité d’Horace, quand il dit: Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus Interpres: là où certes Horace parle tout au contraire de leur intention’; Peletier 1990, 264). Following an aside on the metre in Virgil’s third Eclogue, he returns to his main point and rounds off the chapter. The concluding sentences are worth quoting in full: To continue, word-for-word Translations are ungainly. Not that they are against the law of Translation, but merely because no two languages are the same in their expression. Concepts are common to the understanding of all, but each nation has its own words and manners of speaking. And let no-one invoke Cicero here, who does not praise the conscientious Translator. Indeed, neither do I. All I mean is that the Translator should respect the propriety and idiom of the Language into which he translates. But I do say that as regards that which the two Languages express, the Translator should lose nothing of the way of speaking or even of the idiosyncratic usage of the Author, whose wit and subtlety often consist in this. And if someone were able to translate Virgil into French verse, sentence for sentence, and word-for-word: what glorious praise that would bring. For how could a Translator discharge his duty better, if not by sticking as closely as possible to the Author to whom he has subjected himself? And imagine how splendid it would be to see one Language echo all the elegance of the other, and still retain its own. But, as I said, that is impossible.2

Task of the Renaissance Translator  213

Peletier’s comment on the ungainly nature of literal translations recalls Du Bellay’s censure (‘de mauvaise grace’, ‘n’ont pas grace’). More striking, however, are the ambivalences in Peletier’s words. Literal translations, for him, are not in conflict with the law of translation, which suggests that the law itself is something else. But what exactly is it then? And where does the compatibility between the law and literal translation begin and end? At first, it looks as if Peletier puts some distance between literalism and the law of translation, hence the concessionary ‘not that they are against the law of Translation’ (‘non qu’elles soient contre la loi de Traduction’). Like Cicero, he declines to praise the ‘conscientious’ literalist translator. Later in the passage, however, it appears that it is only in operating as literally as possible, in rendering Virgil ‘phrase pour phrase, et mot pour mot’, in reducing the distance separating translator and author to the minimum (‘en approchant toujours le plus près qu’il serait possible de l’Auteur auquel il est sujet’), that the translator can hope fully to acquit himself of his task (‘son devoir’). That translator would then deserve all due praise and fame (‘louange’, ‘grandeur’). But how much is that, and what does the translator’s task consist in? Earlier in the chapter, Peletier had emphasised that translations are generally held in lower esteem that original writings. Having characterised translation as ‘an occupation bringing more toil than praise’ (‘une besogne de plus grand travail que de louange’), he observed that, even if the translator works ‘well and faithfully’ (‘si vous rendez bien et fidèlement’), it is invariably the original which receives all the praise (‘le plus de l’honneur en demeure à l’original’), and however good the rendering, the difference in status between translator and original author always remains (‘Somme, un Traducteur n’a jamais le nom d’Auteur’; 1990, 262–3). Nevertheless, Peletier had also asserted, paradoxically, that ‘a good translation is more valuable than a poor original’ (‘une bonne Traduction vaut trop mieux qu’une mauvaise invention’; 1990, 263). He resolves the paradox with a reference to the perceived status of translators and original writers: a good translation may be more valuable than a poor specimen of inventio, but the translator will lose out either way. If he elects to render a poor original, he will be blamed for having made the wrong choice, and if he provides a good rendering of a worthy original, it is the original author who collects the prize. The perception only changes when translators are themselves also authors of original works, as Peletier explains in connection with the use of neologisms. As regards new coinages, he recommends great caution on the translator’s part, precisely because readers have a different perception of translated and original writings: ‘a Translator who has not published work of his own elsewhere cannot count on the Readers’ indulgence with respect to words, even though he is most concerned with them. This is why the profession of translating is less esteemed’ (‘Un Traducteur, s’il n’a fait voir ailleurs quelque chose du sien, n’a pas cette faveur des Lecteurs en cas de mots, combien que soit celui qui plus en a affaire. Et pour cela est moins estimé l’office de traduire’; ibid.). Boldness or inventiveness is not readily associated with what translators do. Even in translating an outstanding author, the translator should resort to neologisms only when no other words are available and when

214  Histories

the persistent use of periphrasis and circumlocution would produce too great a ‘déplaisir’ in the reading. While the praise and fame a translator can hope for in Peletier’s terms remain somewhat paradoxical, it is clearly tied to the difference in status accorded translators and authors. This difference in perceived status between translators and authors puts the former in their place and restricts their room for manoeuvre. Leaving aside those literary devices that lend a text its ‘grace’, it would seem that the core requirement is for the translator to render ‘phrase pour phrase, et mot pour mot’, sticking to the source text as closely as possible. Such translations, however, will be unattractive to the aesthetically sensitive reader. They can be squared with the law of translation but not with artistic expression. This appears to be the rub in Peletier’s chapter. If translation is to merit a place in handbooks on the art of poetry, it has to reach for the impossible. It must seek to annul the distance between original and translation by clinging to the former’s every word and nuance, but it also has to retain the stylistic refinement of the original text while respecting the integrity of the receptor language. This, Peletier concedes, is asking too much (‘Mais, comme j’ai dit, il ne se peut faire’). Translation cannot reach beyond itself. The fact that different languages possess different grammatical and idiomatic structures and different rhetorical resources renders total correspondence utopian. Yet total correspondence, the absence of distance, is what the duty of the translator and the law of translation demand. Faced with this dilemma, Peletier ends his chapter by registering the impasse it leads to without proposing a way out. Du Bellay, as we saw, solved the problem by dismissing translation as an instrument of artistic expression. Whenever ‘eloquence’ was involved, he championed imitation over translation. Peletier leaves the impasse unresolved, and this also allows him to leave the duty of the translator and the law of translation unchallenged. Translation is still narrowly circumscribed: translation in the strict sense means a strict form of translating. Deviation, allowing space to open up between the donor and receptor texts, compromises the integrity of the translation and, by implication, of the translator. It cannot be reconciled with the requirement of faithfulness and lays the translator open to the charge of betrayal and fraud. In failing to pay attention to ‘la propriété des mots et locutions’, the translator ‘défraude le sens de l’Auteur’ (Peletier 1990, 262).

12.2 The legal and moral overtones in the notions of fidelity, fraud, the translator’s professional duty and the law of translation all echo Jerome’s famous Letter to Pammachius of ca. 395 (Letter 57), also known as De optimo genere interpretandi ( Jerome 1953). That document is directly relevant here. It, too, speaks of the translator’s duty and of literal translation. It links the two concepts, albeit – as in Peletier’s chapter – in a less than straightforward manner. Let us have a closer look. As is well known, Jerome’s letter was written in self-defence. The

Task of the Renaissance Translator  215

immediate cause was a public and potentially damaging attack, which Jerome puts before Pammachius in the document’s opening paragraphs. He explains that, shortly before, he had responded to an urgent request from a friend and, working at speed, made a Latin translation of a Greek text, which he had further elucidated and annotated in the margin. Although the translation had been intended for private use only, it ended up in the wrong hands, and Jerome stood accused of unprofessional conduct. The accusation levelled against him, he says, boiled down to either professional incompetence, in that he did not know how to translate, or criminal bad faith, in that he had refused to translate properly (‘aut nescui […] interpretari, aut nolui […] alterum error […] alterum crimen’). Either way, he was charged with having delivered a fraudulent product because he had not translated word-for-word (‘contionentur me falsarium, me verbum non expressisse de verbo’). What was expected of a translator, clearly (or as Jerome makes it appear), was just such a translation, a word-for-word rendering. The fact that Jerome’s failure to produce a literal version laid him open to public attack suggests that the word-for-word rule, as a normative expectation, was strong and widely accepted. In the course of his defence, Jerome never challenges the validity of the rule as such. The nearest he comes to it is when, speaking for more cultured readers (‘eruditi’), he sneers at the claim to truth and integrity, the supposed ‘veritas interpretationis’ of the literalists. His tactic, rather, is to proclaim an alternative mode, that of translating ‘ad sensum’ (‘following the meaning’). This mode, he claims, is applicable to all types of texts, with the exception of Scripture, and it separates the cultured, discerning translators from the mass of diligent but dull literalists. His declaration is famous enough: ‘I not only declare but loudly proclaim that in translating from the Greek, except for the sacred scriptures where even the order of the words is a mystery, I translate not word-for-word but sense for sense’ (‘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’; Jerome 1953, 59). But even after his persuasive argumentation regarding the near-impossibility of avoiding either omissions or additions when attempting to translate stylistically sophisticated source texts, Jerome still works a peculiar paradox into his key statement of the translator’s dilemma, which follows a little later: ‘if I translate word-for-word, the result sounds absurd; if of necessity I change anything in the order or the manner of speaking, I will seem to have fallen short of the duty of a translator’ (‘si ad verbum interpretor, absurde resonant; si ob necessitatem aliquid in ordine, in sermone mutavero, ab interpretis videbor officio recessisse’; Jerome 1953, 61).3 Jerome’s reference to ‘the duty of a translator’ (‘interpretis officium’) recalls Peletier’s ‘l’office de traduire’ and the ‘devoir’ of the translator. Jerome’s dilemma, too, resembles Peletier’s. As Jerome puts it, literal translation produces results which grate on the ear, but moving away from literalism means incurring censure of a different kind, as it amounts to abandoning one’s post, failing to live up to one’s responsibility, defaulting on one’s obligation. In arguing against literal translation, Jerome simultaneously confirms the general validity of the rule.

216  Histories

Immediately after he has proclaimed his own policy of translating ‘ad sensum’ rather than ‘ad verbum’, Jerome invokes the authority of Cicero, from whose De optimo genere oratorum he goes on to quote. Here, again, something odd happens. The passage Jerome selects is the one in which Cicero explains that, in rendering two Greek orations into Latin, he did not count out the words individually but paid the whole amount at once. Surprisingly, perhaps, Jerome also repeats, as part of his quotation, Cicero’s remark that, in so doing, he was aware that he was not operating in the manner of a translator but in that of an orator (‘nec converti ut interpres, sed ut orator’) – the implication of which must be, even though Jerome does not draw attention to it, that, in Cicero’s view, translating in the manner of a translator (‘ut interpres’) does mean counting out the words individually – that is, translating word-for-word (‘ad verbum’). The reason Cicero prefers to work ‘ut orator’ rather than ‘ut interpres’ in the versions of Aeschines and Demosthenes to which De optimo genere oratorum serves as a preface, is that he is intent not on reproducing in Latin what the Greek orators actually said but on creating a Latin model of the Attic style of oratory which will be able to displace the Greek sources (Copeland 1991, 45ff ). A very similar duality appears in the opening paragraphs of Cicero’s De finibus, which Jerome does not mention but which tie in with the comments in De optimo genere and, additionally, throw up a reference to the ‘task’ of the translator (Hoskin 1985; Copeland 1991, 9–62). De finibus, like De optimo genere, arises out of the desire to appropriate Greek sources in such a way as to render them redundant. Early on in this work, Cicero voices his disapproval of those Roman Graecophiles who look down on their own Latin culture but delight in literal translations from the Greek (‘ad verbum e Graecis expressas’). He goes on to state that he could have translated in the same plain manner (‘si plane sic verterem’) but chose, on this occasion, to do more, to go beyond what is expected of translators or what is regarded as part of the translators’ task (‘interpretum munus’). The result of this choice is a type of rendering comparable to that used in connection with the Greek orations but now applied to the domain of philosophy and ethics. Of interest in the present context is the fact that when, both in De optimo genere and in De finibus, Cicero speaks of ‘translating’, he employs the same verbs (‘vertere’, ‘convertere’) but suggests that the activity they refer to can be performed in two different ways: ‘as a translator’ (‘ut interpres’) or ‘as an orator’ (‘ut orator’), or in the similar but unnamed capacity applicable to the discursive subject of De finibus. The manner which Cicero calls ‘plain’ because it is unadorned, which does not enjoy the cultural prestige of the ‘ut orator’ style, and which humbly but dutifully counts out the words one by one, is the manner ‘ut interpres’, the manner associated with the task or duty (‘munus’) of the translator. The question of whether, or to what extent, Jerome deliberately reduced the complexity of Cicero’s pronouncements and twisted their intent to serve the purposes of his own polemic against his detractors need not detain us here. The relevant point is that, explicitly in Cicero and somewhat more implicitly in Jerome, we encounter the notion of word-for-word translation as constituting

Task of the Renaissance Translator  217

the proper task and duty (‘officium’, ‘munus’) of the translator, and especially of the plainly honest, faithful, loyal and, therefore, reliable translator. This does not mean that detailing the duty of the translator in individual cases is straightforward or uncontroversial. On the contrary, the alternative ‘ad sensum’ mode will be a constant presence, and it has cultural prestige and self-confidence on its side. But it does mean that when proponents of the more liberal line criticise the literal tendency on the grounds that its word-for-word method results in texts so clumsy as to be unfit for circulation in cultured society, the defence of the strict ‘ad verbum’ manner rests pre-eminently on moral considerations of trustworthiness, integrity, reliability and incorruptibility.

12.3 In the early Middle Ages, with the Christian mistrust of Classical rhetoric acting as a powerful spur, the argument in favour of literalism is eagerly taken up. When Augustine, in his On Christian Doctrine, becomes aware of the potentially damaging differences between existing Latin translations of Scripture, he recommends using the most literal versions because these must be deemed least likely to result in corrupt interpretations. The word-for-word manner which Jerome reserved as appropriate only for the Bible was subsequently adopted for other discourses as well, with Boethius putting the case forcefully and others following suit (Schwarz 1985, 43–48; Copeland 1991, 52–55). Being good Christians, they happily accepted the taint of being no more than faithful translators (‘fidi interpretis culpa’) if that allowed them to lay claim to integrity and access to the naked truth, stripped of all rhetorical embellishment and corruption, just as the Biblical word itself was both plain and true. As Boethius put it in the early sixth century in connection with Porphyry’s Isagoge: ‘in these writings in which knowledge of the matter is sought’ (‘in his scriptis in quibus rerum cognitio quaeritur’), the important thing is ‘not the charm of a sparkling style, but the uncorrupted truth’ (‘non luculentae orationis lepos, sed incorrupta veritas’), and this is achieved ‘through sound and irreproachable translation’ (‘per integerrimae translationis sinceritatem’; Copeland 1991, 52). The emphasis on purity and integrity (‘incorrupta veritas’; ‘integerrimae translationis sinceritas’) leads to paradoxes. The narrow limits which this mode of translating imposes on itself mean that the end product advertises its status as a translated text through its forced, tormented expression – in which it takes a certain pride because it is precisely the textual ungainliness of the product which signals its integrity as a translation. At the same time, however, translators do everything in their power to hide their presence by ensuring that every word of the primary text is covered so scrupulously that its integrity is never compromised. The ascetic self-restraint demanded by literalism seeks to ensure that the translation will cover the original so tightly that no slippage can occur, no hairline crack through which meaning might ooze out or rhetorical or interpretive corruption seep in. But the double movement, in which the translated text

218 

Histories

vaunts its translated status through its wilful hideousness and translators do their utmost to disappear as actively interpreting and meaning-producing subjects, also guarantees that translators have not wrongfully appropriated anything that is not theirs, and simultaneously – another side of the same coin – that they cannot be held responsible for merely handing on someone else’s words. The intermediary does not intervene in any substantive way. The ironic pride of the absent, empty-handed translator consists in the awareness, or at any rate in the ideological self-assurance, of offering the reader an unhindered view of the content of the original, shorn of its rhetorical frills. Considerations such as these appear to mark the dividing line between the translator, on one side, and, on the other, the exegete, as the provider of paraphrases, glosses, commentaries and interpretations. When, in the early medieval period, John Scotus Eriugena was criticised for the obscurity of one of his translations, he countered with the observation that he was merely the work’s translator, not its expositor (‘videat me interpretem huius operis esse, non expositorem’, Copeland 1991, 52, 91), appealing to the notion of the ‘faithful translator’ (‘fidus interpres’) to establish the opposition. In the early Renaissance, oppositions like these determined the ‘office’ of the translator and the field of translation in the strict sense. While, at the end of the fourteenth century, the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, who had left Byzantium a few years earlier and settled in Florence, was recorded as disapproving of word-for-word ‘conversio’ because it could easily pervert the thought expressed in the source text, he remarked, in the same breath, that departing from the words of the original and from the ‘propriety’ of the Greek amounted to abandoning the ‘office’ of translator for that of exegete (‘eum non interpretis, sed exponentis officio uti’; Norton 1984, 35). Around the mid-fifteenth century, the Spanish humanist Alfonso de Madrigal, translating the Chronici canones of Eusebius into Spanish and writing a Latin commentary on them (not printed until the early years of the sixteenth century), speaks in similar terms of two modes of translation. The first, word-for-word, is called ‘interpretacion o translacion’; the other, which does not follow the words, he calls ‘exposicion o comento o glosa’. This latter form, he says, frequently requires many additions and changes (‘muchas adiciones et mudamientos’) so that, in the end, the work is no longer the original author’s but the expositor’s (‘por lo cual non es obra del autor, mas del glosador’; Keightley 1977, 246).4 But additions and changes fall foul of the ‘duty’ of the translator, as Madrigal indicates in his commentary on Eusebius, with a nod in Jerome’s direction: when the translator changes something in the order of words or the manner of speaking, he can do so in two ways, both of which lead away from the translator’s duty, by adding something, or by changing as well as adding, and then he writes commentaries rather than a translation, so that the original work does not remain intact but a new work comes into being which is a commentary or exposition of the first one’ (‘qui mutat in ordine vel in sermone, dupliciter potest mutare, et utroque modo ab interpretis recidit officio; primo modo addendo aliud, vel

Task of the Renaissance Translator  219

mutando ordinem cum aliquali tamen additione, et tunc comentarios agit, non translationem, et iam non videtur manere opus principale, sed aliud novum opus conditur, quod prioris comentum vel expositio est’.) (Keightley 1977, 246) True to these principles, Madrigal declares his intention to keep the translation separate from the commentary, adding that it is translating which is the more difficult task, as it has to be done word-for-word in the interest of the original’s integrity, even if this runs the risk of producing an obscure and demanding discourse (Keightley 1977, 244–45; Norton 1984, 31–32; Santoyo 1987, 36).

12.4 With Madrigal, we have returned to the Renaissance. In sixteenth-century pronouncements on translation, the term ‘officium’ or a modern vernacular variant occurs frequently, most commonly with reference to the task, responsibility, obligation or duty of the translator in a generic sense. Often, it is flanked by the demand or the wish to translate literally or as literally as possible. This striving is seen as the pre-eminent quality of ‘faithful’ translators, who discharge their ‘officium’ by translating in a manner characterised as ‘faithful’, ‘loyal’, ‘truthful’, ‘conscientious’, ‘scrupulous’, ‘religious’ or a similar adjective. The adjectives, in turn, appear to offer word-for-word translators moral compensation for the discomfort they find themselves in, as their sense of duty puts them in a position they describe as constrained, unfree, enthralled, narrowly hemmed in or bound hand and foot. At the same time, this service and sacrifice also grants them a degree of security which the paraphrast must do without. Because paraphrase, glossing and explication inevitably mean the use of words which are the commentator’s own, they increase the risk of error, misinterpretation, misrepresentation and corruption. As for the term ‘officium’ itself and its association with the principle of translating word-for-word, Erasmus uses it in a letter of 1506, which will be discussed below. In 1543, the Swiss humanist Henricus Glareanus demonstrates that, contrary to prevailing opinion, the famous ‘fidus interpres’ passage in Horace’s Art of Poetry, in fact, identifies the ‘verbum verbo’ manner of translating as constituting the translator’s ‘officium’ (Norton 1984, 83). Peletier du Mans follows Glareanus’s reading of the passage a few years later, as we saw. Even at the very end of the sixteenth century, there are editions of Horace’s poetry which feature, next to the ‘fidus interpres’ lines, the marginal gloss ‘interpretis officium’ (for instance, Horatius 1594, 150). In the preface to his Spanish version of the Song of Songs, around 1561, Luis de León discusses the translator’s ‘oficio’ in terms of literal translation – more about this below, too. When, in 1566, the Flemish translator Marcus Antonius Gillis publishes a Dutch version of the emblems of the Hungarian humanist Johannes Sambucus, he says he has acquitted himself of ‘the office of a faithful Translator’ (‘d’officie eens ghetrouwen Oversetters’) by translating Sambucus’s

220 

Histories

compact Latin word-for-word (Hermans 1996, 56). In 1595, Blaise de Vigenère points out that, in his rendering of Torquato Tasso, he has deviated from what he calls, ironically this time, the correct way to translate, which is ‘strictly word for word, as one is obliged to do when translating’ (‘toute à la lettre, ainsi qu’on est obligé es traduction’; Horguelin 1981, 69). Around 1603, the Spanish translator Gregorio Morillo speaks of both the ‘office’ and the ‘laws’ which define the faithful translator’s activity (‘oficio’, ‘las leyes del interprete fiel’; Santoyo 1987, 73–74). When the Antwerp Jesuit Andreas Schottus offers a typology of different forms of translation in his book on Ciceronian imitation (1610), he also picks up the Ciceronian term ‘munus interpretis’ and associates it with literalism (Rener 1989, 287). Schottus’s chapter on translation (‘Liber IV: De optimo genere interpretandi Ciceronem’, Schottus 1610, 268–383) offers a late but powerful assertion of the literalist principle. Schottus begins by distinguishing two kinds of ‘interpretatio’, one called ‘metaphrase’ and the other ‘paraphrase’ (1610, 270–1). Paraphrase, which he describes as involving amplification, explanation and commentary, has three subdivisions: ‘historica’, ‘critica’ or ‘narrativa’ and the more flowery ‘artificiosa’. Metaphrase, which he regards as translation proper, comes in two kinds: ‘faithful’ or ‘scrupulous’ (‘religiosa’), and ‘arbitrary’ (‘arbitraria’). Related to the ‘faithful’ mode but less strict is an intermediate ‘freer’ kind (‘liberior’), which operates on a sense-for-sense principle and is the one Cicero claimed for himself as a more learned mode. Yet Schottus uses quotations from Cicero’s own works to interrogate his subject on the vexed question of what exactly constitutes the translator’s ‘officium’ or ‘munus’ (‘Quodnam, Marce Tulle, munus Interpretis?’; 1610, 321) and concludes it can only be a literalist ‘ad verbum’ mode. Horace is then brought in to support this view. The way in which Schottus describes literalism has a familiar ring. The ‘Fidus Interpres’ is characterised as one who ‘renders word-for-word in such a way that he does not stray a fingernail’s breadth from the author he has undertaken to translate’ (‘qui ad verbum sic reddit, ut ne latum quidem unguem ab auctore, quem interpretandum suscepit, discedat’; 1610, 318) and who is so well versed in both languages that he is able to convey the original author’s sense properly and clearly (‘sit modo linguae utriusque ex aequo peritus, ut sensa auctoris Latine ac perspicue convertat’). Whereas the ‘freer’ mode is content, in the manner of the orators, to represent the overall sense or meaning or idea rather than counting out the individual words (‘Affinis huic, sed largior, quem liberiorem nomino, qui non tam adnumerat verba, quam appendit, Oratorum more, sententiam integre repraesentasse contentus’, and ‘Hanc interpretationem liberam κατα γνώμων, φρασιν ή διάνοιαν vocaverim, quae scriptoris sententiam incolumem magis quam verba conservat’; 1610, 318, 319), the word-forword method is also called – with a reference to the Roman Emperor Justinian – the ‘step-for-step’ method because it traces its model’s every footstep and counts its every word (‘Fidelis autem versio est, κατα λέξιν; quam κατα πόδα vocari a Graecis auctor est Iustinianus Imp. L. I. D. De Jure enucleando: cum Interpretes iisdem quasi vestigiis sic inhaerent, ut verba verbis quasi dimensa ac paria reddant’; 1610, 319). This is reinforced once more when Schottus sums up the Ciceronian and Horatian

Task of the Renaissance Translator  221

view of the task of the faithful translator as ‘decanting into another language, in good faith, word-for-word, adding nothing, omitting nothing, changing nothing’ (Quodnam, Marce Tulli, munus Interpretis? nonne ad verbum, fide bona, in aliam transfundere linguam, nihil ut de tuo addas, demas nihil, nihil denique immutes’; 1610, 321). For Schottus, clearly, the core of the concept of translation lies here. It means counting words in a state of complete loyalty and self-abnegation, in contrast with the sense-for-sense mode of the freer translators and, beyond that, with both the wilful appropriation of the ‘arbitrary’ mode and the expansiveness of paraphrase.

12.5 Schottus’s book has taken us into the seventeenth century. By then, the objections against the literalist principle have become loud and numerous. Of course, the objections were always there, from Jerome onward. In the Renaissance, they gain increasing force, coming primarily from humanist translators and from those vernacular translators who take their cue from the humanist tradition. When Jacques Amyot, for example, writes the preface to his celebrated Lives of Plutarch (1559), he does not even mention the word-for-word manner in his description of the translator’s ‘office’: I ask the readers to consider that the office of a proper translator does not consist only in faithfully rendering his author’s meaning but also in somehow representing and adumbrating his style and manner of speaking ( je prie les lecteurs de vouloir considerer que l’office d’un propre traducteur ne gist pas seulement a rendre fidelement la sentence de son autheur, mais aussi à représenter aucunement et adombrer la forme du style et manière de parler d’iceluy) (Horguelin 1981, 66) These principles will become predominant in the seventeenth century. But let us return for a moment to the sixteenth, to Erasmus and Luis de León. In a letter dated 17 November 1503 concerning his first translation, three orations by Libanius of Antioch rendered from Greek into Latin, Erasmus shows his familiarity with Cicero’s statement, in De optimo genere, about translating as settling an account at once instead of counting out the words one by one like individual coins. He adds, however, that as a novice translator (‘novus interpres’), he has preferred to be too scrupulous rather than too bold (‘religiosior esse malui quam audacior’; Allan 1906, no. 177). His letter of 24 January 1506, in which he discusses his translation of the Hecuba of Euripides, takes up the same idea. Here, Erasmus says he has chosen not to avail himself of the liberty which Cicero grants the translator and that, still regarding himself as a ‘novus interpres’, he has, again, preferred to err on the side of scruple, even of superstition, rather than of licentiousness (‘ut superstitiosior viderer alicui potius quam licentior’; Allan 1906, no. 188). As regards the ‘office’ of the translator, he is dismissive both of the

222 

Histories

paraphrastic alternative, as a flight into ineptitude, like a squid enveloping itself in a dark cloud, and of the expansive rhetorical option as being an unwarranted, self-indulgent addition.5 Both letters stem from a translator who acknowledges his inexperience. While the second letter cannot be said to advocate the word-for-word mode in any exclusive sense, as it has the translator endeavouring to convey ‘the power and weight of the thought with the utmost faithfulness’ (‘sententiae vim ac pondus summa cum fide’), the interest of both letters lies in the fact that they associate faithfulness with the desire to move closer to the words, and, as in the case of Alfonso de Madrigal half a century earlier, distrust the translator’s own interpretive effort. In so doing, they mark the dividing line between the ‘proper’ translator, on the one hand, and the paraphrastic and rhetorical translator, on the other. This distinction is drawn also, and more sharply, by Luis de León, in the prologue to his translation of the Song of Songs (Traduccion literal y declaración del libro de los Cántares de Salomón, ca. 1561; Santoyo 1987, 65–66; López García 1996, 77–79). For Luis de León, the task of the translator is different from that of the commentator (‘entiendo sea diferente el oficio del que traslada […] del que las explica y declara’). The commentator should copiously explain the sense and substance of the text before him, in his own words (‘El extenderse diciendo, y el declarar copiosamente la razon que entienda […] eso quédese para el que declara, cuyo oficio es’). The translator’s task, by contrast, consists in counting out the words exactly as far as possible, supplying for each word another one possessing the same weight, value and range of meanings (‘el que traslada ha de ser fiel y cabal, y si fuere posible, contar las palabras, para dar otras tantas, y no más, de la misma manera, cualidad, y condición y variedad de significaciones que las originales tienen’). Like Peletier du Mans, who, as we saw, would have preferred to see all of Virgil translated into French in this manner but realised it could not be done, Luis de León, too, has to admit that, in the end, the structural asymmetry between languages makes a strict word-forword rendering impracticable. As a result, he has been obliged to intervene to some extent, so as to ensure intelligibility (‘Bien es verdad que, trasladando el texto, no pudimos tan puntualmente ir con el original, y la cualidad de la sentencia y propiedad de nuestra lengua nos forzó á que añadiésemos alguna palabrilla, que sin ella quedaría oscurísimo el sentido; pero estas son pocas’). Despite this pragmatic retreat, which Luis does his best to belittle (he says he only added the odd little word, ‘alguna palabrilla’, and ‘estas son pocas’), the prologue is significant for the way it posits literalism as the ideal form of translation and directly associates the task of the translator with it. Literalism, in its ideal, utopian form, makes the translator disappear so completely behind the words that the reader is given full interpretive access, the ability to generate all the meanings, and only those, that were present in the original, and from that array to select those that seem most appropriate (‘para que los que leyeren la traduccion puedan entender la variedad toda de sentidos á que da ocasión el original si se leyese, y quedan libres para escoger de ellos el que mejor les pareciere’). Whereas commentators (‘el que declara’)

Task of the Renaissance Translator  223

speak in their own name and spread a textual and interpretive layer over the primary text, obscuring as well as enlightening the reader’s view of the source but, inevitably, interfering in the interpretive process, the word-for-word translator should, ideally, be able to present the reader with a painstakingly accurate, unaltered, unadulterated copy of the original, an exact double. This view circumscibes the translator’s role and responsibilities in a way that is reminiscent of Scotus Eriugena’s separation of translation and interpretive exposition and the less sharp distinctions made by Chrysoloras, Madrigal and Erasmus. Between Erasmus and Luis de León, moreover, there stands, chronologically speaking, the figure of Juan Luis Vives. The chapter on translation (‘Versiones seu interpretationes’) in Vives’s De ratione dicendi of 1532 is moderate in tone and comes down in favour of translating ‘ad sensum’ rather than ‘ad verbum’, but it, too, declares that, for certain difficult works, like those of Aristotle, and for religious writings and official documents, counting out the words is the best way to proceed because it reduces to a minimum the translator’s interpretive intervention and, hence, responsibility for the meanings invested in the new text (Coseriu 1971; Vega 1994, 115–18).

12.6 To the extent that translation is construed as ‘saying the same thing’, it appears that literalism constitutes its most secure ideology. It allows translators to negate their own presence and voice by becoming virtually transparent. This ascetic self-abnegation, in turn, forms the basis of the reader’s trust in the translator as re-enunciator. If interpretive non-intervention is the rule, then any translative mode which strays from the original’s words and involves the translator as an interpreting and speaking subject runs the risk of misinterpretation, distortion, corruption of integrity and betrayal of trust. The price for purity and rectitude is a text that is hard to read, to the point of unintelligibility, a form of expression that shames the translator, who, nonetheless, accepts the humiliation in a spirit of self-sacrifice. This is precisely what Jerome’s dilemma consisted in: loyalty to the words puts too heavy a burden on the reader, but abandoning the words is incompatible with the translator’s ethical obligation to transmit the original whole and unadulterated. In the course of the sixteenth century, the dilemma is formulated repeatedly in these terms. As late as 1623, the Dutch writer Constantijn Huygens put it succinctly: ‘If we take liberties in translating, the truth will suffer; if we keep closely to the words, the spirit of the discourse will vanish’ (‘Neemtmen de ruymte in ‘t Oversetten, soo kan de waerheid niet vrij van geweld gaen: Staetmen scherp op de woorden, soo verdwijnt de geest vande uytspraeck’; Worp 1892–1899, vol. I: 284–85). As far as the literal translators are concerned, ‘the truth’ takes precedence over ‘the spirit of the discourse’. The moral underpinning of their position is that they practise their self-denial in the name of truth. Transmitting the original intact requires self-restraint and submission. Thus, for instance, in 1548, in the preface

224 

Histories

to his version of Livy, the French translator Jacques Gohorry declares that he has followed his model as closely as possible because he did not want to ‘violate or tarnish’ its majesty by any ‘addition or diminution’ coming from his own pen (‘suis efforcé de suivre de plus pres qu’il m’a esté possible, estimant telle magesté de dire n’estre a violer ne souiller par addition ou diminution venant du mien’; Norton 1984, 145). Or Denis Sauvage, translating from the Italian in 1551, who ties himself to his original’s every word so as not to allow his own spirit to wander in freedom and stray (‘ j’ay suyvi ma copie Italienne […] presque de mot a mot, sans extravaguer, & sans m’égayer en la liberté de mon esprit’; Norton 1984, 146). Andreas Schottus, as we saw, defined the ‘faithful translator’ in 1610 as one who does not deviate a fingernail’s breadth from his author (‘Fidus Interpres is demum est, qui ad verbum sic reddit, ut ne latum quidem unguem ab auctore […] discedat’) and who does not add, omit or alter anything (‘Nonne ad verbum, fide bona, in aliam transfundere linguam, nihil ut de tuo addas, demas nihil, nihil denique immutes’). In England, Ben Jonson supports this position; in 1627, he praises a translation ‘so wrought / As not the smallest joint or gentlest word / In the great mass or machine there is stirred’ (Spingarn 1908, vol. 1, liv). This, again, leads into the seventeenth century, when the word-for-word principle as constituting both the law of translation and the duty of the translator loses ground. The pressure comes from different sides, as vernacular translators become increasingly aware of the grammatical and idiomatic differences between languages, and humanist or humanist-inspired translators stress the importance of style and rhetorical propriety. The sixteenth-century discourse on translation already showed traces of this tension. It was evident in Joachim du Bellay’s dismissal of translation for literary purposes. What he contemptuously called the ‘law of translating’, a narrowly confined space, was held responsible for texts deemed unpalatable as literature, and writers who wanted to make their mark were advised to turn to imitation instead. Around the same time, the translator Jean Lalement, writing in 1549, intended to stay as close as possible to his author Demosthenes but realised that such a ‘scrupulous’ rendering, ‘quasi word-for-word’, would displease his readers and land him with the reputation of being ‘too religious’ a translator, a label felt to be undesirable (‘si je l’eusse voulu scrupuleusement translater et quasi de mot à mot, à peine eusse-je-esté entendu, et mais reputé trop religieux translateur’; Horguelin 1981, 59). Lalement’s comments suggest that, once words like ‘scrupulous’, ‘religious’ and other key adjectives in the literalist vocabulary acquire negative connotations, the whole arsenal of terms deployed to justify and sustain the word-forword principle comes under threat. This tension can now be recognised as one of the faultlines running through the Renaissance theory of translation. Seen from this perspective, it is the presence of a literalist principle which gives the vocabulary of the liberal translators its oppositional, polemical edge, its urgency and relevance. It then becomes clear that, with the comments by rhetorically trained humanist translators from Gianozzo Manetti and Leonardo Bruni in the fifteenth century to Etienne Dolet, Jacques Amyot, Lawrence Humphrey and

Task of the Renaissance Translator  225

John Christopherson in the sixteenth, various new terms enter the metalanguage of translation which derive their specific thrust and their surplus value from the opposition to the repertoire and the self-justification of the literalists. This is the case with the ‘correct way to translate’ (‘interpretatio recta’) of Leonardo Bruni (Baron 1928; Griffiths et al. 1987; Lefevere 1992, 82–6) and Gianozzo Manetti (Norton 1984, 44–54). Bruni’s ‘De interpretatione recta’ of ca. 1425 insists on the need for the translator to possess a thorough knowledge and mastery of all the resources of both the original and the receptor language, on profound familiarity with the original writers and their contexts, on the requirement for verbal propriety in the translated text and on the preservation of the source text’s stylistic power and individuality, all of which acquires added force when it is seen against the backdrop of the principle and practice of literalist translation. In the title of Etienne Dolet’s ‘The Way to Translate Well from One Language into Another’ (‘Manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre’) of 1540, it is the adverb ‘bien’ which needs stressing, as its concern with ‘translating well’ echoes the ‘bene dicere’, the art of ‘speaking well’ of the humanist rhetorical tradition. The ‘Manière’, then, does not list a few commonplace rules of thumb, as is sometimes thought, but presents an emphatic image of the ideal rhetorical translator, as indeed Glyn Norton has argued (Norton 1974; 1984). Dolet’s rejection of word-for-word translation in the third of his five points has an obvious focus, but the entire treatise is informed by the polemical opposition to what he sees as the pedestrianism of the literalists. The concern for stylistic quality is evident not only in the sheer abundance of terms referring to ‘grace’, ‘majesty’, ‘dignity’, ‘richness’, ‘perfection’, ‘sweetness’, ‘harmony of language’, ‘splendour’, ‘eloquence’ and the ‘properties, turns of phrase, expressions, subtleties and vehemences’ of language in what is quite a short text, but also in the final sentence, when, at the end of his fifth and longest point, which deals with rhetorical figures, Dolet seems to have forgotten he is writing about translation and concludes his brief treatise speaking of the ‘orator’ instead (‘Qui sont les poincts d’ung orateur parfaict et vrayment comblé de toute gloire d’éloquence’; Weinberg 1950, 83). Very much the same stress on the quality of the translating language over and above fidelity to the meaning of the words can be heard in the English humanist John Christopherson’s pronouncements on translation around the mid-sixteenth century. When, writing from Louvain in 1553, Christopherson dedicates his Latin translation of four short works by Philo of Alexandria to Trinity College, Cambridge, he first defines the task (‘munus’) of both translator and editor as one of rendering exactly the original’s meaning, without addition or deviation: in translating as well as in editing ancient writers my principle is, and always has been, not to add anything of my own, not to invent anything, but, when I discharge the duty of a translator, to express truthfully the author’s meaning, and when I work as a corrector, to compare carefully the printed copies with the manuscripts’ (‘Sed mihi certè in veteribus scriptoribus tum convertendis, tum emendandis ea religio & est, & semper fuit, ut nihil de

226 

Histories

meo addere voluerim, nihil confingere, sed cum munere fungerer interpretis, sententiam authoris verè exprimere, cum autem correctoris, exemplaria impressa cum manu descriptis diligenter conferre laborarim’). (Philo of Alexandria 1553, b2r°) However, Christopherson goes on, in translating an original that can boast stylistic elegance, pure diction, concise expression and other such qualities, the aim must be to allow the Latin reader to derive as much enjoyment from the Latin rendering as Greek readers do reading the Greek (‘tum profecto qui Latina solum forte lecturi sint, tantum ex illis delectationis caperent, quantum qui Graeca’; ibid.: b2v°). This, he adds, he could not quite manage, however hard he tried, nor, in his opinion, could anyone working only as a translator (‘Verum nec poteram, etiam si maximè in illud incubuissem, nec quenquam, qui interpres solum esse voluerit, aliquando efficere posse arbitror’; ibid.: b3r°) because the requirement is for a text which makes full use of the grammatical and rhetorical resources of the translating language (‘Danda tamen est opera ei, qui quempiam scriptorem convertere instituat, ut verbis propriis & aptis ad consuetudinem eius linguae, in quam convertit, utatur’). This means that the translator should avoid two errors above all: first, that of neglecting the original author’s sense and meaning in the search for an aesthetically pleasing expression, and second, circumlocution, which is the commentator’s privilege (‘Neque dum sermonis elegantiae student, sensum & sententiam authoris negligat, neque dum partes suscipit interpretis, circuitone, quae es rerum explicatoris propria, utatur: quae duo vitia in vertendo maxime omnium vitanda sunt’; ibid.). Some years later, in the ‘Translator’s Preface’ (‘Proemium Interpretis’) attached to his Latin version of Eusebius’ Historia ecclesiastica (1569), Christopherson reiterates his exacting vision of a rhetorically adequate translation: As I fix the sight of my mind intently on the translation of the Greek, four things in particular seem to be required; a true explanation of sense and meaning, good latinity, harmony, and that perspicuity of speech which I have spoken of. The first is usually held to be relevant for fidelity, the second for delight, the third for the judgment of the ears, the fourth for the understanding […] Although in translating the Scriptures the order of the words should be retained, as St Jerome says, because it is a mystery: yet in the translation of other Greek writings, on the authority of that same Cicero who both cited and imitated them, we should translate not word for word, but meaning for meaning. […] For eloquence is not that empty and almost puerile verbosity which offers itself for sale insolently among the people, but wisdom speaking eloquently and copiously which glides into the minds of the prudent with sweetness.6 Around the mid-century, as humanist-inspired, rhetorically adept translators such as Amyot, Dolet and Christopherson redefine translation by relocating the boundary markers and repartitioning the field, they relegate the word-for-word

Task of the Renaissance Translator  227

principle to the periphery, limiting it to the translation of special classes of texts such as the Scriptures or certain pedagogical works. The literal translator’s professed love of the unadorned truth comes to be seen as a wrongheaded illusion, which neglects the essence – the force, genius, esprit, in short, the power of rhetorically effective language – for the mere husk of the word and its surface meaning. The self-justifying discourse of the literalists is dismissed from a position of cultural superiority. The devaluation of the word-for-word arsenal continues into the seventeenth century. By that time, beginning with figures such as George Chapman in England and François Malherbe in France, a new, culturally self-conscious generation of vernacular translators has come to the fore. Their repeated rejections of literalism suggest that the idea is still alive, but it has been reduced from a ‘religious’ faithfulness to a mere ‘superstition’. Sir Thomas Elyot declared, as early as 1531, with reference to a sermon by Saint Cyprian, that he had ‘traunslated this lytell boke: not supersticiously folowynge the letter […] but kepynge the sentence and intent of the Authour’ (Baumann 1992, 6). In 1616, the academic translator Barten Holyday says he has adopted ‘a moderate paraphrase’ rather than the ‘ferulary superstition to the letter’ in rendering the poems of Persius into English (Steiner 1975, 12). A couple of decades later, this is the way the ‘libertine’ and ‘belles infidèles’ translators in England and France routinely use the term. In the preface to his first published translation (1637), Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt speaks dismissively of the ‘Judaic superstition’ of clinging to the words while disregarding the underlying intent and design (Zuber 1972, 111).7 The positive terms which these translators employ – ‘spirit’, ‘soul’, ‘life’, ‘grace’, ‘elegance’, ‘eloquence’, ‘excellencies’ (Steiner 1975, 24–25) – are exactly those that were introduced into metatranslational discourse by the humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They indicate those qualities which Du Bellay claimed could not be rendered by translators because the ‘law of translating’ did not allow them the necessary flexibility. With the rise of the ‘belles infidèles’ translators in France and the ‘libertine’ translators in England, the climate for culturally prestigious translation has shifted away from the literalist principle. When, around the mid-seventeenth century, another generation of French writers and translators begins to speak of the ‘rules’ of translation (as do, for example, Gaspar Bachet de Méziriac in 1635, Antoine Lemaistre ca. 1650 and Gaspard de Tende in 1660; Horguelin 1981; 82,98, 100), these concepts have not only a different context but also a different basis, being closer to an emerging French Classicist mode of thinking. A different cultural constellation has come into being.

12.7 To return to our starting point, if we are to make sense of the different strands of thinking about translation in the sixteenth century, it helps if we can somehow connect them, if we can read and interpret them in relation and in contrast to one

228 

Histories

another. Of course, the construction of an overall picture joining together heterogeneous discourses remains just that: a construction. But, if we ask ourselves what could be meant, or covered, by terms such as ‘the law of translation’ or the ‘office’ or ‘duty’ of the translator, why writers such as Dolet or Christopherson appear to state the obvious in urging rhetorically adequate translation, or what it is that the seventeenth-century ‘libertine’ translators are arguing against, we find ourselves thrown back on a network of positions, concepts and historical echoes which suggest that writers on translation are aware of other views and approaches and engage in open or covert debate with one another and with their audiences. In responding to the cultural and sociopolitical agendas of their respective environments, and in pursuing their own material and symbolic interests, they build alliances and deploy arguments that reverberate across time and space. Much of the debate about the core of the concept of translation, and, hence, much of the debate about the definition of translation, appears to centre on what constitutes the ‘duty’ of the translator, ideally and in practice. For an understanding of Renaissance theories of translation as a single, if heterogeneous, discursive field, then, it will be useful to think of the contributions to that debate as being interconnected and to interpret them accordingly. The principle of word-for-word translation remains associated with the key notions explored here, even though the validity of the literalist temper is never uncontested and becomes increasingly marginal, an ideology in retreat. To the extent that the conflicts between the rhetorical priorities of the humanistinspired translators and the literalist concerns of the more traditional translators are focused on exactly what constitutes the translator’s duty, the exploration of this cluster of key terms, together with their reverberations back and forth in time, seems likely to take us to the heart of those debates. Insofar as literalism is associated with the ‘law’ of translation and the ‘duty’ of the translator, it provides a privileged way into these discussions.

Notes 1 ‘Mais que diray-je d’aucuns, vrayement mieux dignes d’estre appelés traditeurs que traducteurs? veu qu’ilz trahissant ceux qu’ilz entreprennent exposer […] et encore se prennent aux poëtes, genre d’aucteurs certes auquel, si je scavoy’ ou vouly’ traduyre, je m’adroisseroy’ aussi peu, à cause de ceste divinité d’invention qu’ilz ont plus que les autres, de ceste grandeur de style, magnificence de motz, gravité de sentences, audace & variété de figures, & mil’ autres lumieres de poësie: bref ceste energie, & ne scay quel esprit, qui est en leurs ecriz, que les Latins appelleroient genius. Toutes les quelles choses se peuvent autant exprimer en traduisant, comme un peintre peut representer l’ame avecques le cors de celuy qu’il entreprent tyrer apres le naturel’ (Du Bellay 1948, Chapter VI). Translations are my own unless indicated otherwise (TH). 2 ‘Suivant notre propos, les Traductions de mot à mot n’ont pas grâce: non qu’elles soient contre la loi de Traduction: mais seulement pour raison que deux langues ne sont jamais uniformes en phrases. Les conceptions sont communes aux entendements de tous hommes; mais les mots et manières de parler sont particuliers aux nations. Et qu’on ne me vienne point alléguer Cicéron: lequel ne loue pas le Traducteur consciencieux. Car aussi ne fais-je. Et ne l’entends point autrement, sinon que le Translateur doive garder la propriété et le naïf de la Langue en laquelle il translate. Mais certes je dis qu’en ce que les deux Langues symboliseront: il ne doit rien perdre des locutions, ni même de la privauté des mots de l’Auteur, duquel l’esprit et la subtilité souvent consiste en cela. Et qui

Task of the Renaissance Translator  229

pourrait traduire tout Virgile en vers français, phrase pour phrase, et mot pour mot: ce serait une louange inestimable. Car un Traducteur, comment saurait-il mieux faire son devoir, sinon en approchant toujours le plus près qu’il serait possible de l’Auteur auquel il est sujet ? Puis, pensez quelle grandeur ce serait de voir une seconde Langue répondre à toute l’élégance de la première: et encore avoir la sienne propre. Mais, comme j’ai dit, il ne se peut faire’ (Peletier 1990, 265). 3 Here, Jerome is quoting from his own preface to his translation of the Chronicles of Eusebius, ca. 381. 4 The full quotation is as follows: ‘Dos son las maneras de trasladar: una es de palabra a palabra, et llamase interpretacion; otra es poniende la sentencia sin seguir las palabras, la qual se faze comunmente por mas luengas palabras, et esta se llama exposicion o comento o glosa. La primera es de mas autoridad, la segunda es mas clara para los menores ingenios. Enla primera non se añade, et porende sienpre es de aquel que la primero fabrico. En la segunda se fazen muchas adiciones et mudamientos, por lo qual non es obra del autor, mas del glosador’. The opening rubric of the translation reads: ‘Aqui comiença la interpretacion o translacion del libro De las cronicas o tiempos de Eusebio cesariensse, de latin en fabla castellana’ (Keightly 1977, 246, 244). 5 The full passage reads as follows: ‘dum versum versui, dum verbum pene verbo reddere nitor, dum ubique sententiae vim ac pondus summa cum fide Latinis auribus appendere studeo: sive quod mihi non perinde probatur illa in vertendis authoribus libertas, quam Marcus Tullius ut aliis permittit, ita ipse (pene dixerim immodice ) usurpavit; sive quod novus interpres in hanc malui peccare partem, ut superstitiosior viderer alicui potius quam licentior, id est ut littoralibus in harenis nonnunquam haerere viderer potius quam fracta nave mediis natare fluctibus; maluique committere ut eruditi candorem et concinnitatem carminis in me forsitan desyderarent quam fidem. Denique nolui paraphrasten professus eam mihi latebram parare qua multi suam palliant inscitiam, ac loliginis in morem, ne depraehendantur, suis se tenebris involuunt. Iam vero quod Latinae tragoediae grandiloquentiam, ampullas et sesquipedalia, ut Flaccus ait, verba hic nusquam audient, mihi non debent imputare, si interpretis officio fungens eius quem verti pressam sanitatem elegantiamque referre malui quam alienum tumorem, qui me nec alias magnopere delectat’ (Allan 1906, 419–20). 6 ‘Mihi in convertendis Graecis aciem mentis acrius defigenti quatuor potissimum videntur requiri, vera sensus sententiaeque explicatio, latinitas, numerus, et ea, quam dixi, sermonis perspicuitas. Primum ad fidem, secundum ad delectationem, tertium ad aurium iudicium, quartum ad intelligentiam solet acommodari. […] Quamvis enim in sacris literis interpretandis ordo verborum retinenda est, ut ait D. Hieronymus, quia mysterium est, tamen in aliorum Graecorum interpretatione eodem authore Cicerone et citante et imitante, non verbum e verbo, sed sensus de sensu exprimendus. […] Eloquentia non est illa inanis et prope puerilis verborum volubilitas, quae saepe in populo insolenter se venditat, sed diserte et copiose loquens sapientia, quae in prudentum animos cum suavitate illabitur’ (Binns 1978, 135–36). Translated by J.W. Binns. 7 In his edition of Perrot d’Ablancourt’s prefaces, Roger Zuber does not comment on the use of the term ‘Judaic’. It seems likely that the explanation for it will be the same as that given by Glyn Norton for the occurrence of a similar reference a century earlier, in a court case of 1534 between the Sorbonne and the lecteurs royaux concerning the translation and interpretation of the Bible. There, it was alleged that to interpret and translate well one must ‘take out the medullary and mystical sense and not adhere to the cortex of words as do the Jews’ (‘il faut prendre, sensum medullarem et mysticum, & non reddere verbum verbo, seu adhaerere cortici verborum ut faciunt Iudaei’). As Norton shows, the idea that Jewish readings of the Bible followed the letter rather than the (Christian or pre-Christian) spirit is also attested in several fifteenth- and sixteenth-century legal works (Norton 1984, 60–62; 1987,10). It seems likely that Perrot d’Ablancourt is referring to this traditional perception.

Bibliography Allan, P.S., ed. 1906. Opus epistolarum Desiderii Erasmi. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon. Baron, Hans. 1928. Leonardi Bruni Aretino. Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften mit einer Chronologie seiner Werke und Briefe. Leipzig & Berlin: B.G. Teubner.

230 

Histories

Baumann, Uwe. 1992. ‘Sir Thomas Elyot als Übersetzer: Übersetzungtheorie und Übersetzungspraxis im englischen Frühhumanismus’. In Literaturübersetzen: Englisch, edited by Herwig Friedl, A.-R. Glaap and K.P. Müller, 3–26. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Bellay, Joachim du. 1931. Œuvres poétiques. Edited by Henri Chamard. Paris: Droz. Bellay, Joachim du. 1948. La Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse [1549]. Edited by Henri Chamard. Paris: Didier. Binns, J.W. 1978. ‘Latin Translations from Greek in the English Renaissance’. Humanistica Lovaniensia 27, 128–59. Copeland, Rita. 1991. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coseriu, Eugenio. 1971. ‘Das Problem des Übersetzens bei Juan Luis Vives’. In Interlinguistica, edited by K. Bausch and H. Gauger, 571–82. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Griffiths, Gordon et al., ed. 1987. The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni. Selected Texts. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies. Hermans, Theo. 1992. ‘Renaissance Translation between Literalism and Imitation’. In Geschichte, System, literarische Übersetzung/Histories, Systems, Literary Translations, edited by Harald Kittel, 95–116. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Hermans, Theo. 1996. Door eenen engen hals. Nederlandse beschouwingen over vertalen 1550– 1670. The Hague: Stichting Bibliographia Neerlandica. Horatius, Quintus Flaccus. 1594. Quinti Horatii Flacci […] poemata omnia. Leyden: Franciscus Raphelengius. Horguelin, Paul, ed. 1981. Anthologie de la manière de traduire. Montreal: Linguatech. Hoskin, Keith. 1985. ‘Verbum de verbo. The Perennial Changing Paradox of Translation’. In Second Hand, edited by Theo Hermans, 10–45. Antwerp: ALW. Keightley, R.G. 1977. ‘Alfonso de Madrigal and the Chronici Canones of Eusebius’. The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 7, 225–48. Labourt, J., ed. 1953. Saint Jérôme. Lettres. Vol. III. Paris: Les belles lettres. Lefevere, André, ed. 1992. Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook. London & New York: Routledge. López García, Dámaso, ed. 1996. Teorías de la traducción. Antología de textos. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. Norton, Glyn. 1974. ‘Translation Theory in Renaissance France: Etienne Dolet and the Rhetorical Tradition’. Renaissance and Reformation 10, 1–13. Norton, Glyn. 1984. The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and their Humanist Antecedents. Genève: Droz. Norton, Glyn. 1987. ‘The Politics of Translation in Early Renaissance France: Confrontations of Policy and Theory during the Reign of Francis I’. In Die literarische Übersetzung. Fallstudien zu ihrer Kulturgeschichte, edited by Brigitte Schulze, 1–13. Berlin: Erich Schmidt. Peletier du Mans, Jacques. 1990. Art poétique [1555]. In Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance, edited by Francis Goyet, 235–324. Paris: Librairie Générale Française. Philo of Alexandria. 1553. Philonis Iudaei […] libri quatuor […] iam primum de Graeco in Latinum conversi. Translated by John Christopherson. Antwerp: Johannes Verwithagen. Rener, Frederick. 1989. Interpretatio. Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Santoyo, Julio-César, ed. 1987. Teoría y crítica de la traducción. Antología. Bellaterra: Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. Schottus, Andreas. 1610. Tullianarum Quaestionum De instauranda Ciceronis imitatione libri IIII. Antwerp: Jan Moretus.

Task of the Renaissance Translator  231

Schwarz, Werner. 1985. Schriften zur Bibelübersetzung und zur mittelalterlichen Übersetzungstheorie. London: Institute of Germanic Studies. Spingarn, J.E., ed. 1908. Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon. Steiner, T.R., ed. 1975. English Translation Theory 1650–1800. Assen & Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. Sturrock, John. 1990. ‘Writing Between the Lines: The Language of Translation’. New Literary History 21, 993–1013. Vega, Miguel Ángel, ed. 1994. Textos clásicos de teoría de la traducción. Madrid: Cátedra. Weinberg, Bernard, ed. 1950. Critical Prefaces of the French Renaissance. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Worp, J.A., ed. 1892–99. De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens. 9 vols. Groningen: Wolters. Zuber, Roger, ed. 1972. Nicolas Perrot D’Ablancourt. Lettres et préfaces critiques. Paris: Marcel Didier.

13 MIRACLES IN TRANSLATION Justus Lipsius, Our Lady of Halle and Two Dutch Translations [2015]

This is a tale of two translations. It is, in many ways, an unremarkable tale about two rather similar Dutch translations of a decidedly minor Latin original in the early seventeenth-century Low Countries (roughly the area comprising the modern Netherlands in the north and Belgium in the south). The tale cannot be told on its own. Interwoven with it is another story concerning a very similar work, now in Dutch and French, and its translation into several other languages, including Latin. Both stories involve partly the same actors: writers and printers, churchmen and lay people, some wielding political power, others enjoying cultural capital. The two stories in turn fit into, and help to shape, much larger and opposing ideological narratives, those of Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe. For all the similarities between the two translations on which I will focus, they exhibit that momentous divide in the sharpest possible form. Written with a sense of deep hostility, they were printed almost within sight of the military front line, and they drew on locations that had become highly significant in sustaining the religious and ideological divisions feeding the violent conflict that was tearing the Low Countries apart in the years around 1600. The key players are the internationally famous humanist and University of Leuven professor Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), the bilingual Brussels patrician and town secretary Philips Numan (c.1550–1617) and the otherwise little-known Albert van Oosterwijck (died 1616), who was based in Delft. The story involves several printers, primarily Christopher Plantin’s successor Jan (or Joannes) Moretus in Antwerp, Rutger Velpius in Brussels and Bruyn Harmensz Schinckel in Delft. The books and translations, all published within a few years in the first decade of the seventeenth century, concern miracles said to have taken place due to the intercession of the Virgin Mary in Halle and Scherpenheuvel, two small localities in the southern Low Countries, in the vicinity of Brussels. DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-17

Miracles in Translation  233

The Low Countries, at this time, presented a scene of war. An armed rebellion against Habsburg rule had begun four decades earlier and engulfed all of the Low Countries. Shortly after 1585, following significant military gains by the Spanish army, the war acquired a territorial aspect, with the southern provinces, now in the grip of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and known as the Habsburg or Spanish Netherlands, pitted against the breakaway, Calvinist-dominated Seven United Provinces, also known as the Dutch Republic, in the north.

13.1 The story begins early in 1591, when the learned Justus Lipsius, who hailed from the Southern Netherlands but had been a professor at the staunchly Calvinist University of Leiden in the north for 13 years, obtained permission to go to Germany for health reasons.1 Lipsius left Leiden and travelled to Mainz, where he announced his decision to return to the Catholic faith of his youth. Via Cologne, he reached the prince-bishopric of Liège. From there, he sent his letter of resignation to Leiden, citing poor health. He joined the Marian sodality which the Jesuits had established in Liège and, in September, gave a lecture on Our Lady to the sodality. Earlier in the year, he had already indicated to his close friend, the Antwerp printer and publisher Jan Moretus, that his real intention was to return to his alma mater, the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain). His appointment followed in June 1592, and within months, Lipsius found himself back in Leuven. He promptly joined the local confraternity of the Virgin Mary. As perhaps the most illustrious professor at the University, Lipsius ingratiated himself to the powers that be. In 1595, the Spanish Habsburg king Philip II appointed him royal historiographer. In the autumn of 1599, when the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, the new sovereigns in the Spanish Netherlands, made their Joyous Entry into Leuven, they granted him a private audience and, at their own request, attended one of his lectures. The Archdukes surpassed Lipsius in their veneration for the Virgin Mary. On 10 February 1596, the day before his solemn entry into Brussels as the new governor-general of the Netherlands, Albert had prayed at the side chapel dedicated to the Black Madonna in the church at Halle, a small town a few miles southwest of Brussels. On 13 June 1598, Albert, in readiness for marrying Philip II’s daughter the Infanta Isabella, renounced his ecclesiastical career by depositing his cardinal’s robes – including, presumably, his hat – on the altar of Our Lady in Halle. On 14 September of the same year, as he set out for Spain to collect his bride, he again stopped to pray at Halle. The following year, as the newlywed couple entered the Low Countries as sovereigns, they once more prayed in the chapel at Halle before travelling on to Brussels. In subsequent years, Albert would visit the chapel at the beginning and end of his military campaigns against the Protestant rebels who, in the Northern Netherlands under the leadership of the House of Orange, had formed the breakaway Seven United Provinces.

234 

Histories

Apart from Halle, there were two other significant Marian shrines in the Low Countries. One was at Laken, close to the centre of Brussels. Around 1600, when it became clear that the Archdukes had trouble producing children, Albert went on regular walks to the Madonna there, as she was known to cure infertility. The other was at Scherpenheuvel (the name means ‘pointed hill’ or ‘sharp hill’), near Zichem, a good 25 miles northeast of Brussels and less than a day’s walk from Leuven.2 Scherpenheuvel was a new shrine, originally no more than a wooden statue placed in a tree; miracles had begun to happen there only in recent years, but its fame was growing rapidly. Lipsius visited Our Lady’s chapel in Halle in June 1601 to pray for good health. He returned a year later and, on this occasion, donated his silver pen to the Virgin, together with a Latin poem explaining that this was the instrument with which he had written his major works. He made a third visit in September 1604. Much had happened by that time. In Scherpenheuvel a wooden chapel had been built in 1602, and in June 1603, the Archdukes, recognising the potential of the new shrine, sent money for the construction of a stone building. The Archdukes were keen to enlist Our Lady’s support for their military efforts. The port of Ostend, in rebel hands since 1597, had been besieged by the Spanish Army of Flanders since 1601, so far without success. When, in the middle of August 1603, a rebel army under Prince Maurice, William the Silent’s second son, laid siege to the town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in northern Brabant, the Archdukes vowed to pilgrimage in person to Scherpenheuvel if the town held out against the enemy. On 8 September, some 20,000 pilgrims were said to have visited the Scherpenheuvel shrine. Probably around this time, the Archbishop of Mechelen (Malines), Mathias Hovius, charged the newly appointed bishop of Antwerp, Joannes Miraeus, with the task of gathering testimonies about the miracles at Scherpenheuvel, in compliance with recommendations made by the Council of Trent. The bishop passed the task on to the Brussels town secretary Philips Numan, who set to work immediately. In November, Prince Maurice suddenly broke off the siege of ‘s-Hertogenbosch; within days, the Archdukes journeyed to Scherpenheuvel to thank the Virgin Mary (Duerloo 2012, 131; Duerloo and Wingens 2002, 28, 45). Lipsius, meanwhile, had been planning a short treatise, in Latin, on the miracles wrought through the intercession of the Virgin at Halle. In the autumn of 1603, two of his friends in Antwerp supplied him with transcripts of the church registers documenting miracles over a period of several hundred years. The material must have been exactly what Lipsius wanted, and he worked fast. He finished the manuscript of his Diva Virgo Hallensis on 5 January 1604, having spent, as he says in his preface to the reader, not more than ten working days on it (Lipsius 1604, [*4v]). He rounded off his account with the poem on his silver pen (Lipsius 1604, 80–1). In March, Jan Moretus dispatched an artist to Halle to paint the chapel ad vivum, with a view to illustrating the book (Voet 1972, vol. 2, 214, 225). In July, Lipsius signed the dedication to the Archbishop of Cambrai

Miracles in Translation  235

Guillaume de Berghes, and in August, Moretus was sending out copies of the finished product, in both quarto and octavo editions, to friends and relations. Around the time that Lipsius was completing his treatise on the Virgin of Halle, Philips Numan had concluded his report on the miracles at Scherpenheuvel and was preparing it for publication. The books began to appear in the summer of 1604, and versions in different languages soon multiplied (as detailed in Bowen 2008, 90–9, 163–304), indicating a conscious propaganda effort. Numan’s account of Scherpenheuvel was brought out in Dutch by Rutger Velpius in Brussels in July (Numan 1604a). Lipsius’s Latin Diva Virgo Hallensis came out in Antwerp in August, as we saw; there was also an octavo edition printed by David le Clerc in Paris. When, later in 1604, Velpius issued Numan’s own French version of the miracles at Scherpenheuvel (Numan 1604b), Numan sent a copy to Lipsius. The Antwerp bishop Joannes Miraeus made a partial Latin translation of Numan’s book and sent this to Lipsius as well. In the meantime, the symbolic value of the Scherpenheuvel shrine was becoming more manifest every day. Dutch troops attacked the place on 7 September, robbing pilgrims and ransacking the chapel.3 On 22 September, the seaside town of Ostend finally fell to the Archdukes’ general Ambrogio Spinola, after a siege that had lasted three years. The sovereigns credited the Virgin with the victory, donated the pewter plate on which Spinola had received the keys of Ostend to Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel and ordered defences to be constructed around the shrine to prevent further rebel attacks. Lipsius gave in to the pressure to produce a Latin version of Numan’s book on Scherpenheuvel. Again, he worked quickly, taking considerable liberties with Numan’s text. He dedicated his version to the Infanta Isabella on 17 April 1605, and the book, Diva Sichemiensis sive Aspricollis (‘Our Lady of Zichem or Scherpenheuvel’), was published by Moretus a month later under Lipsius’ own name (Lipsius 1605b); the printer used the same fonts he had used for Diva Virgo Hallensis. A Spanish version, by the Archdukes’ chaplain César Clemente and intended for the largely Spanish-speaking court in Brussels, must have been prepared at this time as well, with Velpius as the publisher (Numan 1606a). Clemente signed the dedication to the Archdukes in November, and, although the book did not come out till early in 1606, the privilege was dated 1 July 1604, suggesting that this version had already been planned when Numan was preparing his original Dutch version for the press. An English translation by Robert Chambers, confessor to the English Benedictine nuns in Brussels, and based on Numan’s French version, was also brought out early in 1606 by the Antwerp publisher Arnout Conings (or Arnold Conincx) (Numan 1606b). The propaganda value of Lipsius’s Diva Virgo Hallensis and of the various versions of Numan’s book on Scherpenheuvel was clear enough, and the high social status of most of the dedicatees underlined the power politics involved. This was a propaganda campaign directed or at least encouraged and supported from above. But the scene was one of conflict, and negative reactions were not long in coming. Parodies of Lipsius’s self-congratulatory poem on his silver pen were

236 

Histories

circulating early in 1605, and in the spring, the Delft printer Bruyn Harmensz Schinckel, in the Northern Netherlands, issued Lipsius’s Hallensis in a Dutch translation by Albert (or Ælbert ) van Oosterwijck, signing as Æ.V.O., who framed his generally close rendering of the text with a long series of extremely hostile paratexts (Lipsius 1605a). The translation, the dedication of which was dated 5 March 1605, must have been available before Lipsius’s Latin version of Numan’s Scherpenheuvel book went to press because, at the end of his Sichemiensis sive Aspricollis, Lipsius inserted a brief and haughty response to the Dutch translator; it was probably added at the last minute and printed on four unnumbered pages between the approbatio and the privileges. The appearance, in rebel territory, of a hostile translation of Lipsius’s book on Halle obviously put a spanner in the works. It disrupted a concerted propaganda effort and had to be countered. Almost immediately, Numan was approached for an alternative Dutch version that would be pro-Catholic and loyal to Lipsius, and Lipsius agreed. The new version was ready by September 1605 (as the official approvals show and as Numan also indicates in his address to the reader), but, for reasons unknown, did not come out till 1607. I will compare Numan’s version with Van Oosterwijck’s below. A French translation, by Louis du Gardin de Mortaigne, a doctor from Enghien in Hainault, was published by Velpius at the end of 1605 (Lipsius 1605c). The rest is aftermath and consists of more reactions and responses for and against. As early as 1605, a Latin attack on Lipsius’s Diva Virgo Hallensis appeared anonymously in Heidelberg, penned by the German Calvinist Peter Denaisius; a Dutch version came out in the same year (Denaisius 1605a, 1605b). The Carmelite Anastase Cochelet rebutted it in his Palaestrita honoris D. Hallensis of 1607, a defence that was apparently also published in Dutch, French and German (De Landtsheer 2004, 85; Bass 2007, 178). Another attack launched from Germany was Wolfgang Mamphrasius’s Dissertatio de miraculis […] D. Virginis Hallensis, Justi Lipsi Hallis patratis, which appeared in Leipzig in 1606. The attacks did not do Lipsius’s reputation any good. In March 1606, however, Lipsius had died; on his deathbed, he is said to have gifted his fur cloak to Our Lady of Leuven. Very soon afterward, George Thomson’s Vindex veritatis adversus lustum Lipsium (London, 1606) took issue with both of Lipsius’s Marian books but especially Sichemiensis sive Aspricollis. Claudius Dausqueius’s response to Thomson, D. Mariae Aspricollis Θαυματουργου scutum, featured a dedication to the Archduke Albert dated 1 May 1606, but was not published till 1616 (De Landtsheer 2004, 86). In 1607, the Antwerp Jesuit Jan (or Joannes) David brought out another defence of Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel, now in Dutch verse, against Protestant attacks.

13.2 Lipsius’s Diva Virgo Hallensis is a slight book of less than 100 pages. The various privileges and approbations appear at the end. They conclude with an unusually personal address by Lipsius to his publisher, Jan Moretus, in which the

Miracles in Translation  237

author recalls his friendship with Moretus’s father-in-law, the great Christopher Plantin, and grants his friend the exclusive right to print this book. Lipsius’s good relations with the Officina Plantiniana were indeed of long standing, going back all the way to Lipsius’s first published book in 1569. In 1584, moreover, Moretus himself had translated Lipsius’s bestseller, De Constantia, into Dutch. Lipsius dedicated his Diva Virgo Hallensis to the Archbishop of Cambrai, Guillaume de Berghes, whose imprimatur he had sought early in 1604, and who had expressed admiration on reading the manuscript (De Landtsheer 2004, 74–5). In the address to the reader which follows the dedication, he declares to be writing not as a churchman or theologian but as a historiographer, in accordance with his royal title. His account is based, he explains, on copies of official documents handed to him by two respected individuals in Antwerp, who are mentioned by name: the canon Aubertus Miraeus, nephew of the bishop Joannes Miraeus, and the prominent citizen Joannes Hovius. The main narrative is spread over 36 chapters (Lipsius 1604, 1–81). The chapters at the start and conclusion serve as bookends: the opening chapter offers an autobiographical note and a personal reflection, the final chapter a peroratio and the poem on his silver pen. Chapters 2 and 3 sketch historical background to the statue and the church, while Chapters 34 and 35 list nobles who were members of Marian sodalities and donated to Our Lady. The chapters in between are concerned with reports of miracles. The account of individual events is preceded by a description of the church at Halle in Chapter 4 and, in Chapter 5, a discussion of the three criteria used to distinguish true miracles from trickery, delusions and black magic. The criteria are magnitude (true miracles being non-trivial and evidently supernatural), the end to which miracles are performed (they must be beneficial) and faith (true miracles being attested either in the Scriptures or in reliable sources). In Chapter 5, Lipsius is evidently not writing as a historian. Lipsius regularly intervenes in his narrative in the first person singular. For the sake of variety, he tells us, he has put some chapters wholly or partly in verse. The miracles are not related in a strict chronological order. Most took place in the fifteenth century, but both at the beginning (in Chapter 7) and the end (in Chapter 33), some recent miracles are recounted, the last one dating from 1602. The information about these more recent events, Lipsius explains at the beginning of Chapter 33 (1604, 65–6), comes from votive tablets placed in the church at Halle. Neither Lipsius nor Philips Numan appears to have known the identity of the Dutch translator who signed as Æ.V.O. Lipsius, whose response at the end of his Sichemiensis only counters the personal charges against him, refers to his opponent as ‘a certain Dutch buffoon’ (‘sannionis cuiusdam Batavi’), a ‘windbag’ (‘homo nebulo’), a ‘loudmouth’ (‘balathro’) and a ‘rascal’ (‘tympanotriba’) (Lipsius 1605b, no page). Numan, in his preface, surmised that the Delft translator might be a lapsed Catholic, perhaps a former monk (‘zekere persoon Apostaet, (dencke ick), wtgheloopen Moninck’) (Lipsius 1607, *2r), presumably because Æ.V.O. seemed familiar with Catholic literature.

238 

Histories

Not very much is known about Albert van Oosterwijck. The year of his birth is uncertain, but he hailed from the northern town of Deventer and, as Numan had guessed, had a Catholic background. He entered the Franciscan order in 1588 and served as a priest in Sint-Truiden (Saint-Trond) and Hasselt, some 50 miles east of Brussels. At the end of the 1590s, however, he converted to Calvinism and returned to the northern provinces. He preached first in Enkhuizen and then, from 1602 onward, in Delft, where he made a name for himself as a hardline Calvinist. He died in Delft in 1616 (Biografisch lexicon 2001, 397; Van Bleyswijck 1667, 450–1; Boitet 1729, 440, 479). One of his three children, Volckerus van Oosterwijck (1602–75), also became a church minister and gained modest fame as a religious poet and translator. Delft, in the early seventeenth century, was a town with a reputation for tolerance, possibly because relatively few southern immigrants, many of whom had moved north for religious reasons and were generally hardline Calvinists, had settled there. The town was run by a so-called Council of Forty, which assisted the sheriff, burgomasters and aldermen in keeping public order. Between 1573 and 1615, only slightly more than half of all the new appointees to the Council were members of the Reformed congregation. Of the population itself, only a minority belonged to the Reformed Church (Bok 2001, 201–2). Both Van Oosterwijck and Bruyn Harmensz Schinckel, who published Van Oosterwijck’s translation of Lipsius, will have been among this minority. Bruyn’s father, Harmen Schinckel, was executed in Delft in 1568, aged 32, for printing anti-Catholic books. On the day of his execution, he wrote four farewell letters, to his wife and to each of his three children, which are among the most moving and personal documents of the age (they were printed in Van Bleyswijck 1667, 428–9). His youngest child, Bruno (or Bruyn), was then less than a year old. Like his father, Bruyn Harmensz Schinckel became a printer. He appears to have taken over the business, which his mother had kept going, around 1588. He printed for the States of Holland, grew into a prominent citizen and even joined the Council of Forty, with offices in the town centre (Van Tiggelen 1981, 162). Between 1588 and 1625, he published around 150 books, mostly in Dutch, but also in French and Latin, including a good number containing anti-Catholic sentiments or polemic. Van Oosterwijck’s translation of Lipsius could not have found a more appropriate publisher. We are better informed about Van Oosterwijck’s rival translator, Philips Numan (1550–1627), a ‘learned patrician’ from Brussels, who became the city’s secretary (Porteman and Smits-Veldt 2008, 133). His role brought him into regular personal contact with influential people in the capital. Numan wrote in Dutch, French and Latin and translated from Latin, French and Spanish. His Catholic credentials were not in doubt. Apart from book-length moralising poems in Dutch, he produced occasional pieces, including a Latin panegyric on the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. The majority of his translations concerned religious work. In addition to the Guía de pecadores (1567) by Luis de Granada, which he rendered into Dutch in 1588, Numan translated the Italian Capuchin

Miracles in Translation  239

friar Bernardino da Balbano’s Mistero della flagellazione di N.S. Gesù Cristo (1537) from a French version into Dutch in 1607, together with a treatise by the Jesuit Fulvio Androzzi. He also rendered, first into French and then into Dutch, two dialogues on miracles by Andrés de Soto, the confessor to the Infanta Isabella (De Soto 1613; 1614). In the preface to his translation of Luis de Granada, he voiced his relief that Brussels had recently been liberated from ‘the brutal and tyrannical oppression by the rebellious heretics’ (‘de slaeffelijcke ende tyrannige oppressie der wederspannigher heretijcken’; Luis de Granada 1588, 6) – a reference to the period of Calvinist rule (1577–85) in the major southern towns including Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent and Bruges, which ended when the Spanish Governor-General Alexander Farnese, initially operating from Mons in the French-speaking province of Hainault, reconquered most of the rebel-held territory in the Southern Low Countries in the years 1583–85. It was in Mons, then Farnese’s headquarters, that the printer Rutger Velpius (c. 1540–1614), who had begun his business in Leuven, made his mark around 1580 as a publisher of anti-rebel literature. When Farnese retook Brussels in 1585, and the city regained its role as the seat of government and court, Velpius settled there and became the town’s official printer. His printing shop, the Golden Eagle, was located ‘close to the Court’, as the title pages of many of his books proudly declared. Apart from official ordinances and decrees, he printed books in Dutch, French and Spanish on a variety of subjects, some with an Iberian slant, from Spanish grammars, dictionaries and collections of proverbs to works on military discipline and an edition of Don Quixote (Cervantes 1607), which formed the basis of the first English translation of the novel (Cervantes 1612) by Thomas Shelton, an Irish Catholic who spent some years in Flanders between 1604 and 1613 (Knowles 1958). Other books printed by Velpius featured Catholic anti-Protestant polemic by leading Jesuits such as Franciscus Costerus and Jan David. But he also issued verse translations of Petrarch into French and of Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas’s Première semaine into Dutch (Petrarca 1600; Du Bartas 1609). In 1603, he brought out a book of Marian devotion by Mathias de la Bruyère, who, like his father Jean de la Bruyère, was a member of the French Catholic League. In 1605, he followed this up with a book about miracles said to have happened in the church of St Gudula in the centre of Brussels. The book, in French, by the canon of the church, was dedicated to the Infanta Isabella and mentioned the large number of people now making the pilgrimage to Scherpenheuvel (Ydens 1605, 4r); a version in Dutch published three years later contained a liminary poem signed ‘P.N. van Bruessel’, presumably Philips Numan (Ydens 1608, x4r).

13.3 The illustration on the title page of Lipsius’s Diva Virgo Hallensis shows the Virgin Mary on a pedestal in an oval flanked by angels. The title page of Van Oosterwijck’s version seems a close copy of Lipsius’s original. Numan’s title page

240  Histories

features an illustration showing the Virgin’s statue in a church interior, flanked by candles and votive offerings evoking the church at Halle. Lipsius’s original contains a further illustration between pages 14 and 15, depicting the actual chapel of Our Lady in the church at Halle; the engraving, signed by Cornelis Galle, was based on the painting or drawing Moretus had specially commissioned for the book, as we saw above.4 Both Dutch translations preserve Lipsius’s marginal notes, which are very brief and few in number. Both versions may also be characterised as paraphrastic, the increase in the number of words being due not only to the greater compactness of Latin as an inflected language but also to Lipsius’s famously terse Tacitean manner of writing. Numan proves even more expansive than his rival. The 87 words of Lipsius’s Chapter 10, for instance, have grown to 150 in Van Oosterwijck and 165 in Numan; Chapter 26 has 115 words in Latin but 171 in Van Oosterwijck and 197 in Numan. There are other differences. As a Southerner, Numan is noticeably more familiar than Van Oosterwijck with place names in the French-speaking area of the Low Countries. In Chapter 9, Lipsius mentions that ‘Angianum in Hannoniâ opidum est’ (Lipsius 1604, 27), which Van Oosterwijck renders as ‘Engien is een Stadt van Henegouwen’ (Lipsius 1605a, 32; ‘Engien is a town in Hainault’); Numan gives both its French and its Dutch name: ‘In Henegouwe leegt een cleyn Stedeken ghenoemt Enghien oft Edinghen’ (Lipsius 1607, 44; ‘In Hainault there is a small town called Enghien or Edinghen’). When, in Chapter 34, Lipsius lists towns that participate in annual processions in Halle, he adds some smaller localities as well: ‘Municipia autem: Lembeca, Quiuraniae, Crispinum, Brania, Busigniacum, & Sancti’ (1604, 72). Numan gives the list correctly as ‘Lembeke, Quievrain, Crespin, Braine, Bussigny ende Santen’ (1607, 117), but Van Oosterwijck offers a confusing linguistic mix of Dutch (‘Braine’), Latin (‘Sancti’), a combination of Dutch and Latin (‘Lembeck’) and Latin names with their endings lopped off (‘Quiuran’, ‘Crispin’, ‘Busigniac’; 1605a, 78).5 The way the two translators treat Lipsius’s verse brings us closer to their ideological preoccupations. Lipsius had ended both his first and last chapters with poems and, for the sake of stylistic variation, put virtually the whole of Chapters 12, 19 and 31 into verse. Numan keeps the poems from Chapters 1 and 36 but renders the other three chapters in prose, simply mentioning in the margin that the original here has verse. Van Oosterwijck everywhere follows Lipsius in the use of verse but rudely undercuts his author by suggesting melodies for two of the chapters: an obviously bawdy song for Chapter 31 and, most tellingly, the Wilhelmus, the signature song of the Dutch rebels (and currently the Netherlands’ national anthem), for Chapter 19. This intervention occurs in the margin rather than in the actual translation. Indeed, while Van Oosterwijck’s and Numan’s translations, as such, do not significantly diverge, their framing makes them radically different. This is not to say that the translated texts themselves do not differ. They do, in small and sometimes interesting ways. If anything, Van Oosterwijck remains closer to Lipsius’s

Miracles in Translation  241

Latin. He offers what today’s translation studies jargon calls a ‘documentary’ translation – one that, as far as the translating language permits, aims to give the reader as accurate an impression as possible of what the original looks like, holding it up as an exhibit to be inspected. Van Oosterwijck’s marginal notes address Lipsius directly in the second person or speak about him in the third person, in both cases marking the distance between translator and author. Numan, by contrast, delivers an ‘instrumental’ translation, one which seeks to perform the same role that the original was intended to perform. In the process, he closely aligns himself with Lipsius, occasionally making his author’s meaning more explicit by means of specifically Catholic vocabulary. For example, in Chapter 5, where Lipsius asks, rhetorically, why God does not perform miracles in his own name but through the mediation of the saints and especially of the Virgin Mary (1604, 18), Numan elaborates and speaks explicitly of ‘invoking’ (‘aenroepen’) the saints (1607: 28). The term carries Tridentine overtones, having been used in the twenty-fifth session of the Council of Trent, which dealt with sacred images and with the invocation, veneration and relics of the saints (Schroeder 1978, 215). Van Oosterwijck’s attitude to Lipsius is one of outright contempt and hostility, as the framing of his translation makes abundantly clear, beginning with its lengthy title advising the reader that the book’s aim is to mock popish idolatry, to which end ‘brief annotations are put in the margin (Lipsius’s text remaining intact)’ along with introductory materials and an appendix at the end.6 The liminary texts in his version are extensive and involve several hands. Apart from the dedication to the sheriff, burgomasters and aldermen of Delft (Lipsius 1605a, 3–4), signed Æ.V.O., and the unsigned translator’s preface to the reader (1605a, 5–13), the front matter includes liminary poems signed P.V.B., A.L., D.L., D.N. and N.N. The book concludes with another poem (1605a, 96), signed D.D., followed by an appendix, with new pagination, containing a selection of miracles taken from Cornelis Columbanus Vrancx, Den tweede cout der nichten (‘The women’s second conversation’) of 1601 (1605a, 1–19) – about which more will be said below – and a poem (1605a, 20–24) signed R.Don: M. & R.B.7 The beginning and end of the Lipsius translation are explicitly marked (1605a, 16, 95), and the translation includes Lipsius’s original dedication and address to the reader as well as its approbations. Numan’s translation has far fewer liminary texts and no separate dedication. After the translator’s address to the reader (only pages 2–5 of which are numbered) there are just two pieces in verse, signed A.M. and N.H.V.B., followed by the privileges and approbation. Lipsius’s translated dedication and preface come after this (1607, A1r–A5r), and then his main text begins on new pagination.

13.4 The translators make their case in their respective prefaces, even though neither offers more than the standard Catholic and Protestant arguments for and against the belief in miracles, the veneration of images and the intercession of

242  Histories

saints and of the Virgin Mary. Not surprisingly, Van Oosterwijck is the more aggressive and vituperative of the two, his discourse peppered with Biblical references. He dismisses the statue of Our Lady as no more than a lump of wood and its veneration as idolatry. We should not pay homage to images or offer up cardinals’ hats and silver pens to statues, he declares. Numan appears pained at such wilful misrepresentation of the Catholic position, which, he explains, distinguishes between statues and what they represent. He reads miracles as ‘signs of truth’ (‘teeckenen des waerheyts’; 1607, no page), God showing through miracles whose side he favours. On the whole, Numan adopts a dignified tone, calling his opponent an ‘ungodly scoffer and Lucianist’ (‘ongoddelyck spotter ende Lucianist’; ibid.) but leaving the real insults to the authors contributing verse, one of whom wonders if the Delft translator composed his version ‘somewhere in a cowshed behind the cowpats?’ (‘Yevers in een stal, achter den dreck der koeyen?’; ibid.). Although Numan justifies his re-rendering of Lipsius on the grounds that the Delft translation was ‘not everywhere as correct as it should have been’ (‘niet soo rechtelyck in alles als dat behoorde’; 1607, 2), the fact that the two translations differ in only minor ways suggests the real reason for the new version lay in Van Oosterwijck’s numerous marginal notes, which, Numan claims, strayed ‘far from the truth and from [Lipsius’s] intended meaning’ (‘verre buyten die waerheyt ende buyten zijn meyninge’; 1607, 2). Indeed, Van Oosterwijck’s notes, on virtually every page of his translation, work hard to discredit Lipsius’s account and destroy his trustworthiness. They do this in a variety of ways. Apart from frequent reminders that the statue of Mary is no more than a piece of wood, Van Oosterwijck regularly invites his readers to check individual miracles against the criteria for recognising genuine miracles that Lipsius himself had outlined in his fifth chapter (1605a, 33, 37, 38, 44, 48, 50, 53, 55, 56, 60, 70). Whenever Lipsius admits his sources failed to record exact dates, places or the names of those involved, Van Oosterwijck’s notes cast doubt on the veracity of the record (1605a, 29, 33, 35). Lipsius’s personal credibility is undermined when, right in the opening sentence of Chapter 1, his statement professing a lifelong devotion to Our Lady is countered by a note recalling the years he spent at the Calvinist University of Leiden. The next note on the same page suggests that Lipsius’s return to Catholicism and his association with the Jesuits was motivated by a desire to gain access to the corridors of power. The colloquial tone of many of the notes serves to ridicule the learned Lipsius and his high-minded style. Some notes invoke Classical mythology, the Aeneid or popular literature, reducing Lipsius’s alleged truth to various kinds of fiction (1605a, 60, 62). The paratexts of both translations affect the translations themselves but in different ways. In Numan’s case, they merely confirm his ideological loyalty to Lipsius and to Catholic orthodoxy, enabling a reading of the translated text as owned jointly by translator and author. In Van Oosterwijck’s case the glaring ideological discrepancy between the main text and the paratexts

Miracles in Translation  243

makes the apparent loyalty of the close translation deeply ironic. Because the paratexts hold the original at arm’s length, the translation’s textual faithfulness is designed to show up what the translator clearly regards as the original author’s bad faith. One note in the margin of Van Oosterwijck’s version pinpoints a major difference of Biblical interpretation between Protestants and Catholics at the time. Lipsius ended Chapter 11 with a prayer to the Virgin Mary: ‘O potens, ô benigna, nos quoque ab eodem fallaci serpente defende: & quae caput eius semel in sacrâ partione tuâ contrivisti, […] adiuva’ (29–30; ‘O mighty, o merciful one, protect us, too, from the deceitful serpent; you who once crushed its head in your holy offspring, help us’), which both translators render in near-identical terms: ‘O machtighe/ o goedertieren Vrouwe/ beschermt ons oock van dat bedriechlijck serpent/ ende die daer eens zijn hooft hebt gheplettert in u heylighe baringhe/ helpt ons’ (Numan in Lipsius 1607, 47–48) and ‘O machtige/ o goedertierene/ verdedicht ons van die selve bedriechlicke slanghe/ ende wilt ghy/ die eens in uwe heylige baringe haer hooft hebt verplettet/ ons helpen’ (Van Oosterwijck in Lipius 1605a, 34). In his marginal note, however, Van Oosterwijck corrects the Biblical reference: it is not Mary but Christ who will crush the serpent’s head. Both Lipsius and Numan follow Catholic tradition. Indeed, the Catholic Douai-Rheims translation in English and the Leuven Bible translated by Nicolaus van Winghe, first printed in 1548, both based on the Vulgate, read for Genesis 3:15: ‘I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head’ and ‘Ic sal viantschap stellen tusschen u ende der vrouwen / ende tusschen u saet ende haer saet / Sij sal u hooft verpletten’ (my emphasis, TH). By contrast, Van Oosterwijck adopts the Protestant reading. The so-called Deux-Aes Bible of 1562, the main Protestant version in Dutch before the States Bible of 1637, has: ‘Ende ick wil vyantschap setten / tusschen dy ende den wijve / ende tusschen dynen zade ende haren zade: dat selve sal dy den kop verterden’ (‘And I shall put enmity between you and the woman / and between your seed and her seed: and it [literally: this same] will crush your head’) (my emphasis, TH). Today, it is Van Oosterwijck’s version which is accepted as correct.8 Numan adds just a single marginal note to his translation, and it supports Lipsius’s claim to historical authenticity. In Chapter 6, Lipsius, speaking of events dating back to 1489, had mentioned in his main text that he had personally seen letters written in Latin by the Archduke Maximilian of Austria, adding in the margin that he was shown these letters by Charles, Duke of Croy and Aarschot.9 This claim to authenticity is echoed in the marginal note Numan inserts in the next chapter. That chapter also contains one of the few passages in which Numan writes his own ideological position into his translation. The miracles related in the chapter are said to have happened during the years when Brussels was under Calvinist rule (1577–85), but nearby Halle was not. On two successive days, 9 and 10 July 1580, the military governor of Brussels, Olivier van den Tempel (or van den Tympel), tried, unsuccessfully, to overpower Halle. Where Lipsius

244 

Histories

merely states that Brussels in those years had gone over ‘to the other side’ (‘in alias partes’; 1604, 23), and Van Oosterwijck follows him in this neutral expression (‘d’andere zijde’; 1605a, 28), Numan speaks of ‘the side of the Prince’s rebels’ (‘de zyde der Rebellen vanden Prince’; 1607, 37). The anecdote told in the chapter concerns a rebel soldier, Jan Zwijck, who boasted that, when they had taken Halle, he would cut Our Lady’s nose off, only to suffer the Virgin’s wrath when he had his own nose shot off by a defender. His fellow soldiers later joked that they would send him to Halle to get his nose back. At this point, Numan adds his own note, calling on his personal experience to corroborate Lipsius’s account: Dit es te Bruessel over al genoech bekent, ende openbaer, hebbende die Oversetter deser, doen tertyd binnen Bruessele wesende die gheschiedenisse van desen soldaet van verscheyden persoonen verstaen, ende worde de voors. soldaet inder voors. stadt onder die van den garnisoene ghemeynlyck (by spot ende geckinghe om zyns roemens wille) ghenoemt onse lieve Vrouwe van Halle. (This is public knowledge throughout Brussels, the translator of the present text, who was in Brussels at the time, having heard the story of this soldier from several people; those of the garrison in the said city commonly called the said soldier (by way of mocking and ridiculing his boastfulness) Our Lady of Halle.) (Lipsius 1607, 38) Van Oosterwijck, too, at one point, adds a note with a personal touch. One of the most interesting passages in Lipsius’s book, in several respects, occurs in Chapter 33, a collection of various short episodes concerning miracles of recent date. One of these mentions one Anthony Chamber, a soldier, who, surrounded by enemies, remained miraculously unharmed because he had apparently been rendered invisible by Our Lady. In Lipsius’s Latin, the anecdote begins like this: Anno ∞ D.XCV. Antonius Chamberius Anglus natione, vicarius Centuriae Tribuni sui Stanleij: cùm Spadam in Eburonum tractu, ad laudatos illos & medicatos fontes venisset, fors fuit (memini, & pars periculi eram) ut Batavi trecenti equites inopinati advenirent, multos opprimerent, & abducerent captivos. (When in 1595 the Englishman Anthony Chamber, a Lieutenant in the regiment of his captain Stanley, was travelling through Liège and had come to the acclaimed medicinal springs at Spa, it happened (I remember it, for I too was in danger) that suddenly three hundred Dutch cavalry arrived, who robbed many and led them away as captives.) (1604, 68) Van Oosterwijck, as usual, translates fairly close to the Latin (his reference to ‘three’ rather than ‘three hundred’ Dutch cavalry appearing on the scene must be a misprint or a slip) but adds a marginal note putting Chamber’s superior Stanley down as ‘that shameful traitor’:

Miracles in Translation  245

Int Jaer 1595. Als Anthoin Chamber een Engelsman van gheboorte/ Lieutenant vande Compagnie van zijn Overste Standley,* te Spae inde Contreye vande Luyckenaren/ tot die loflicke ende medicinale Fonteynen was gehecomen/ ist by geval gheweest (ick bint’ indachtich/ ende was int selve perijckel) dat drie [sic] Hollantsche Ruyters onverwacht aen quamen/ veel verdructen ende gevangen wech voerden’.

* Dien ­schandighen Verrader

(Lipsius 1605a, 74)

Numan’s version is not very different, except that he identifies the 300 cavalry more explicitly (and antagonistically) as belonging to ‘the rebels of Holland’ (‘vande rebellen van Hollant’): ‘Int jaer 1595. Antoni Chamber Engelsman/ Lieutenant vande Compaignie des Heeren Couronnels Stanley, reysende int Landt van Luydick, tot die loflycke ende ghesonde fonteyne van Spa, es ghebeurt (soo my wel ghedenct/ want ick mede int peryckel was) dat onversiens zijn overghecommen drye hondert ruyteren vande rebellen van Hollant, die welcke vele menschen overvielen ende gevanghen namen‘. (Lipsius 1607, 111) The Dutch raid on Spa, a resort near Liège, in July 1595, is historical, and Lipsius was there, as he says. He was taking a holiday and a cure at the famous springs together with his Leuven colleague and friend, the theologian Leonardus Lessius, when the pair managed to evade the marauding rebel troops by jumping over some fences and walls – a feat Lipsius subsequently elaborated on in several letters (De Landtsheer 2000, 326; De Landtsheer, Sacré and Coppens 2006, 265). Nothing is known about Lieutenant Anthony Chamber, but William Stanley’s role in the military history of the Low Countries explains Van Oosterwijck’s contemptuous marginal note. Although Stanley was a Catholic who had raised his own regiment in Ireland, he joined the Earl of Leicester on the side of the Dutch rebels in August 1586. He distinguished himself in the battle at Zutphen in September of that year (in which the poet Philip Sidney was fatally wounded) and was made governor of Deventer. In a blatant act of treason, however, he surrendered the town to the Spanish in January 1587. He subsequently entered Spanish service with his entire regiment; he travelled to Spain on several occasions but spent most of his remaining years among the English Catholic exiles in Flanders.10 Van Oosterwijck hailed from Deventer. Stanley’s defection must have been a poignant local and perhaps even a personal memory, and this explains his glowering note. Anthony Chamber, for his part, must have gone over to the Spanish side together with his superior, thus having a good reason to want to avoid falling into the hands of the Dutch raiders in Spa in 1595.

246 

Histories

13.5 But there’s more, and some of it remains slightly puzzling. Already in his translator’s preface, Van Oosterwijck had shown familiarity with Catholic theology and apologetics, his marginal notes referring to specific works by Pietro Bembo, Hieronymus Platus (Girolamo Piatti), Gabriel Biel, Francisco de Ribera and Richard of St Victor.11 At the end of his translation of Lipsius’s address to the reader, he inserts a note speaking of ‘uwen Duncanus’ (1605a, 4; ‘your Duncanus’), a reference to Martinus Duncanus (Maarten Donck or Verdonck), a fiercely antiProtestant priest who was active in Delft between 1558 and 1572, when he had to flee the town. Van Oosterwijck’s Appendix, too, contains marginal notes and a range of references, but, as its 20 chapters relate a series of further ‘Popish fables’ or alleged miracles, the references now detail the many and varied sources of the anecdotes which Van Oosterwijck has gathered. They come from a life of Catherine of Siena, from the Legenda aurea, from the Chronicle of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland, from Cornelis Columbanus Vrancx’s Den troost der zielen (‘The soul’s comfort’) of 1601 (1605a, 13, 15, 17, 18) and from Elias Hasenmüller’s history of the Jesuit order and Martin Eisengrein’s book on the Marian shrine at Altötting in Bavaria, both of which tell the story of an exorcism performed by the Dutch Jesuit Petrus Canisius at Altötting in 1570 (1605a, 14).12 However, the majority of the miracles in the Appendix are taken, as Van Oosterwijck acknowledges (1605a, 1), from another book by Cornelis Columbanus Vrancx, Den tweeden cout der nichten (‘The women’s second conversation’), also published in 1601, and all are meant to fall well short of the criteria Lipsius had outlined in his fifth chapter to distinguish real miracles from fakes. The result is that the Appendix discredits Lipsius’s account even further. Vrancx’s Tweeden cout der nichten is a dialogue between two women, Willemyne and Margriete, and reports several hundred miracles said to have occurred at various Marian shrines in the Low Countries and elsewhere in southern and central Europe, including Montserrat in Spain and Loreto in Italy. Little attempt is made to authenticate the alleged events. Margriete occasionally claims some miracles have been approved by a bishop or even the Pope (Vrancx 1601b, 58), but the great majority she has merely ‘read or heard about’. As it happens, the episode involving Anthony Chamber in Spa in 1595 also features in Vrancx’s Tweeden cout: Als Antheunis Chambres op den heylighen dach van de Visitatie omringhelt was van zijn Vyanden / te voete ende te Peerde zijnde te Spa: hy dacht op de wonderlicke Mirakelen van ons lieve Vrauwe van Halle / ende haer aenroepen hebbende met zeker belofte / hy wierdt mirakeleuselick beschermt en verlost / int Jaer 1595. (When Antheunis Chambres on the holy day of the Visitation was surrounded by enemy soldiers and cavalry in Spa, he thought of the wondrous miracles of Our Lady of Halle and, invoking her with a certain promise, he was miraculously protected and saved, in the year 1595.)13 (1601b, 11)

Miracles in Translation  247

The anecdote forms part of the opening section of Vrancx’s book, which goes straight into a series of miracles ascribed to Our Lady of Halle. Van Oosterwijck obviously had access to the book but, surprisingly, does not make as much of the overlap between it and Lipsius’s account as he might have done. The overlap is not restricted to this one anecdote. Vrancx (1601b, 7–15) relates about 17 miracles ascribed to Our Lady of Halle, eight of which reappear in Lipsius, including the one about the boastful soldier Jan Zwijck who, in 1580, had his nose shot off. Only one of these, the story of a stillborn child brought back to life to be baptised, is taken up in Van Oosterwijck’s appendix (Lipsius 1605a, 1–2) with a cross-reference to Lipsius’s Chapter 21. In his translation of Lipsius’s Chapter 33, Van Oosterwijck had pointed out inconsistencies in dates and names between the accounts offered by Lipsius and Vrancx (1605a, 73, 74) and had referred to Vrancx’s book to contest the claim Lipsius had made in his opening chapter to be the first to write about the miracles at Halle (1605a, 76). In addition, Van Oosterwijck repeatedly mocked the vagueness of some of Lipsius’s archival sources, and Vrancx’s cavalier attitude toward authenticating the numerous miracles he relates must have seemed an easy target. Nevertheless, he does not press his advantage. Perhaps the whole miracle business appeared so absurd to him that it made little difference whether particular events had received church scrutiny and approval. If so, Lipsius’s emphasis on the documentary evidence for his account, and the high social status of those who had helped him with it, left his opponent unimpressed. Equally surprising is that neither Lipsius nor Numan ever mention Vrancx. It is impossible to believe that Lipsius was not aware of him, if only because, in 1602, Vrancx brought out another two books of Marian devotion (Vrancx 1602a; 1602b). Perhaps Lipsius felt that acknowledging a popular writer like Vrancx would compromise the seriousness of his own ‘historiographical’ account. Numan, for his part, had no reason to deviate from that line.

13.6 Conclusion Van Oosterwijck was by no means the only one casting doubt on the seriousness of Lipsius’s Diva Virgo Hallensis. Its weakness as a tract was obvious even to Lipsius’s friends. Latin poems lampooning his verses on his silver pen began circulating within months of the tract’s publication, and book-length attacks followed. Probably at least as damaging, however, was the fact that Van Oosterwijck’s unexpected and unwelcome translation was into Dutch, making Lipsius a laughing stock for all to see. It must have reminded the scholar of his bitter polemic with Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert, who, following the publication of Lipsius’s Politica in 1589, stubbornly attacked him in the vernacular, with Lipsius responding, rather haughtily, in Latin. The polemic is thought to be one of the factors that persuaded Lipsius to leave Leiden in 1591 and may explain why his response to Van Oosterwijck at the end of the Diva Sichemiensis sive Aspricollis preferred invective to argument. The threat of another humiliation may also explain the speed and scale

248 

Histories

of the reaction in the Spanish Netherlands, where authorities, authors and printers were not only quick to produce an alternative Dutch translation of the Diva Virgo Hallensis but, in addition, saw to it that Numan’s report on Scherpenheuvel had the widest possible distribution in a range of languages and continued to be expanded and updated in the following years. Translations were, thus, a significant part of the war of words pitting the Southern against the Northern Netherlands and, more broadly, Counter-Reformation Europe against Reformation Europe.

Notes 1 The chronology and detail in the following paragraphs owe much to Bass 2007; De Landtsheer 2000, 2004, 2012; De Landtsheer, Sacré and Coppens 2006; De Nave 1997; Duerloo 2012. 2 Scherpenheuvel and Zichem, like the nearby town of Diest, were lands belonging to the House of Orange. William the Silent (1533–84), the Prince of Orange, was also the main leader of the Revolt. The Archdukes saw it as ‘a sign of heaven that at such a location a humble statue would assert the veracity of Catholic doctrine on miracles and on the cult of saints and relics’ (Duerloo 2012, 131). In 1568, William the Silent’s eldest son, Philips Willem (1554–1618), had been abducted and taken to Spain as a hostage. He remained a Catholic all his life, returned to the Low Countries with Archduke Albert in 1596 and became Lord of Diest. He is buried there in the Church of St Sulpice. 3 An account of the Dutch attack appeared in the second edition of Numan’s original Dutch version, printed by Velpius and published by him in Brussels and by Zangre (or Zangrius) in Leuven, and, like the first edition, was dated 1604 but not completed till early in 1605 (Bowen 2008, 274–6). 4 The Ghent University Library copy of Van Oosterwijck’s translation contains, between Lipsius’s address to the reader and his first chapter, a portrait of the author aged 36; it is signed L. Vorsterman, presumably Lucas Vorsterman (1595–1675). This must be a later insertion. The British Library copy has no such illustration. 5 The modern names are Lembeek (in the Belgian province of Flemish Brabant), Quiévrain (in the province of Hainault), Crespin (Département du Nord, France), Braine (probably Braine l’Alleud, in the Belgian province of Walloon Brabant), Busigny (Nord- Pas de Calais, France) and Santes (Département du Nord, France). 6 The full title reads: I. Lipsii Heylige Maghet van Halle. Hare weldaden ende Miraculen ghetrouwelick ende ordentlick wtgheschreven. Wt de Latijnsche in onse Nederlantsche tale overgheset, deur eenen Lief-hebber der eere sijns eenigen Salichmakers; tot bespottinghe der Pauselicke Roomsche Afgoderije. Tot welcken eynde cleyne Annotatien (den tekst Lipsij in zijn geheel blijvende) op de kant gestelt zijn: een getrouwe Vermaninghe en Voor-reden tot den Christenen voor aen ende een Appendix ofte Aenhanghsel van Miraculen die wel spots wert zijn achter aen (‘J. Lipsius’ Holy Virgin of Halle. Her benefactions and miracles faithfully and clearly described. Translated from Latin into Dutch by one who holds the honour of our sole Saviour dear; to mock the Popish Romish idolatry. To which end brief annotations are put in the margin (Lipsius’ text remaining intact): with a true admonition and preface to Christians in front and an appendix of miracles deserving of scorn at the end’). 7 I have not been able to identify the individuals behind the various initials. A likely candidate for D.D. is Daniel vander Dolegen or Dolegius, originally from Brussels, who served as a minister in Delft from 1590 until his death on 21 November 1605 (Van Bleyswijck 1667, 450). The poem by R.Don: M. and R.B. that concludes the appendix mentions a recent book about Our Lady of Scherpenheuvel and shows awareness that Lipsius is preparing a Latin version of it; a marginal note in Van

Miracles in Translation  249

Oosterwijck’s address to the reader adds that the book was printed in Brussels (1605a, 8), which confirms that the reference is to Numan’s 1604 account of the miracles at Scherpenheuvel. 8 The Vulgate reads: ‘inimicitias ponam inter te et mulierem, et semen tuum et semen illius: ipsa conteret caput tuum’ (http://en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/Seed​_of​_ the​_woman ). Today, the reading ‘ipsa’ (meaning ‘she will crush your head’) is held to be an error, and this is now recognised by the Catholic Church as well; the Nova Vulgata (1969–79), authorised by the Vatican, has replaced ‘ipsa’ with ‘ipsum’ (hence, ‘it will crush your head’) (http://www​.vatican​.va​/archive​/ bible​/nova ​_vulgata​/documents​/nova​-vulgata​_vt​_ genesis​_ lt​.html#3). The Douai-Rheims Bible is at http://www​.drbo​.org/. The Dutch Bible translations are at http://www​.bijbelsdigitaal​.nl/ (accessed April 2014). 9 The reference is probably to Charles II of Croÿ, Duke of Aarschot, 1560–1612. 10 In 1596, Stanley and César Clemente (who would become the Spanish translator of Numan’s report on Scherpenheuvel) signed a letter with testimonials in favour of the English Jesuit William Holt, who, in turn, a few years later, assisted in the establishment of the English Benedictine convent in Brussels, to which Robert Chambers (Numan’s English translator) acted as chaplain for 20 years (Arblaster 2004, 37; Hallett 2012, 225). 11 Pietro Bembo, Epistolarum Leonis Decimi Pontificis Max. nomine scriptarum libri sexdecim, 1535; Hieronymus Platus, De bono status religiosi libri III, 1591 (Van Oosterwijck refers to a 1593 edition); Gabriel Biel, Epitome expositionis canonis missae, Antwerp 1561; Francisco de Ribera, SJ, In librum duodecim prophetarum commentarii, 1590; Richard of St Victor, De trinitate (various editions). 12 Elias Hasenmüller, Historia ordinis Iesuitici… (Frankfurt 1594); Martin Eisengrein, Unser liebe Fraw zu alten Oetting (Ingolstadt 1571). Eisengrein’s book, several hundred pages long, went through at least ten editions before 1626 (Soergel 1991, 134; Heal 2007, 155–6). 13 The feast day of the Visitation (Luke 1: 39–45) was on 2 July (until 1969, when it was moved to 31 May).

Bibliography Arblaster, Paul. 2004. Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Balbano, Bernardino da. 1607. Theylich mysterie van die gheesselinghe ons heeren Iesu Christi. Translated by Philips Numan. Leuven: J. Maes. Bass, Marisa. 2007. ‘Justus Lipsius and his Silver Pen’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 70, 157–94. Biografisch lexicon. 2001. Biografisch lexicon voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlandse protestantisme. Deel 5. Kampen: Kok. Boitet, Reinier. 1729. Beschryving der stadt Delft […] door verscheide liefhebbers en kenners der Nederlandsche oudheden. Delft: Reinier Boitet. Bok, Jan Marten. 2001. ‘Society, Culture and Collecting in Seventeenth-Century Delft’. In Vermeer and the Delft School, edited by Walter Liedtke, 196–210. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Bowen, Karen L. 2008. Marian Pilgrimage Sites in Brabant: A Bibliography of Books Printed between 1600–1850. Leuven: Peeters. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 1607. El ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. Brusselas: R. Velpius. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. 1612. The history of the valorous and wittie knight-errant, Don-Quixote of the Mancha. Translated by Thomas Shelton. London: Andrew Crooke.

250  Histories

David, Joannes. 1607. Beweeringhe vande eere ende mirakelen der hoogh-verheven Moeder Godts Maria, tot Scherpen-heuvel. Antwerp: Plantijnsche Druckerije by Jan Moerentorf. De la Bruyère, Mathias. 1603. Le rosaire de la tres-heureuse vierge Marie. Brussels: Rutger Velpius. De Landtsheer, Jeanine. 2000. ‘From North to South. Some New Documents on Lipsius’ Journey from Leiden to Liège’. In Myricae. Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Memory of Jozef IJsewijn, edited by D. Sacré and G. Tournoy, 303–31. Leuven: Leuven University Press. De Landstheer, Jeanine. 2004. ‘Justus Lipsius’ Treatises on the Holy Virgin’. In The Low Countries as a Crossroads of Religious Beliefs, edited by A.-J. Gelderblom, J.L. de Jong and M. van Vaeck, 65–88. Leiden & Boston: Brill. De Landtsheer, Jeanine. 2012. ‘From Philip Numan’s Miracles of the Virgin of Montaigu (1604) towards Justus Lipsius’s Diva Sichemiensis sive Aspricollis (1605)’. In Texts Beyond Borders: Multilingualism and Textual Scholarship, edited by W. Dillen, C. Macé and D. van Hulle, 61–87. Amsterdam: Rodopi. De Landtsheer, Jeanine, Dirk Sacré and C. Coppens, eds. 2006. Justus Lipsius (1547– 1606). Een geleerde en zijn Europese netwerk. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Denaisius, Petrus. 1605a. Dissertatio de idolo Hallensi, Iusti Lipsii. [No place, no publisher.] Denaisius, Petrus. 1605b. Verclaringhe des Halschen Afgodts van Iustus Lipsius. Wonderveyl ende cierlijk opghepronct ende voorts ghedaen. [No place, no publisher.] De Nave, Francine, ed. 1994. Antwerpen, dissident drukkerscentrum. Antwerp: Museum Plantin-Moretus. De Nave, Francine, ed. 1997. Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) en het Plantijnse Huis. Antwerp: Museum Plantin-Moretus. De Soto, Andrés. 1613. Deux dialogues traitans […] les miracles. Translated by Philippe Numan. Bruxelles: Rutger Velpius & Hubert Antoine. De Soto, Andrés. 1614. Twee t’samensprekingen […] vanden mirakelen. Translated by Philips Numan. Brussel: Rutgeert Velpius & Huybrecht Antoon. Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste. 1609. De eerste weke der scheppinge der werelt. Translated by Theodore van Liefvelt. Bruessel: Rutger Velpius. Duerloo, Luc. 2012. Dynasty and Piety. Archduke Albert (1598–1621) and Habsburg Political Culture in an Age of Religious Wars. Farnham: Ashgate. Duerloo, Marc and Marc Wingens. 2002. Scherpenheuvel. Het Jeruzalem van de Lage Landen. Leuven: Davidsfonds. Eisengrein, Martin. 1571. Unser liebe Fraw zu alten Oetting […]. Ingolstadt: Alexander Weissenhorn. Hallett, Nicky, ed. 2012. English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800. Part 2, Volume 3: Life Writing I. London: Pickering & Chatto. Hasenmüller, Elias. 1593. Historia ordinis Iesuitici […]. Frankfurt: Iohannes Spies. Heal, Bridget. 2007. The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany. Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knowles, Edwin. 1958. ‘Thomas Shelton, Translator of Don Quixote’. Studies in the Renaissance 5, 160–75. Lipsius, Justus. 1604. Diva virgo Hallensis. Beneficia eius & miracula fide atque ordine descripta. Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, apud Ioannem Moretum. Lipsius, Justus. 1605a. I. Lipsii Heylige Maghet van Halle […]. Translated by Albert van Oosterwijck. Delft: Bruyn Harmensz Schinckel. Lipsius, Justus. 1605b. Diva Sichemiensis sive Aspricollis: Nova eius beneficia & admiranda. Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, apud Ioannem Moretum. Lipsius, Justus. 1605c. La Nostre Dame de Hav [sic]. Ses bien faicts & miracles… Traduictz du Latin, par M. Louis du Gardin de Mortaigne […]. Brussels: Rutger Velpius.

Miracles in Translation  251

Lipsius, Justus. 1607. Die heylighe maghet van Halle […] uyt den Latyne int Nederlantsche overghesedt door Philippus Numan […]. Brussels: Rutger Velpius. Luis de Granada. 1588. Den leydtsman der sondaren […] in Duytscher talen overgheset […] door Philips Numan van Bruessel. Antwerp: Christopher Plantin. Mamphrasius, Wolfgang. 1606. Dissertatio de miraculis […] D. Virginis Hallensis, Justi Lipsi Hallis patratis […]. Leipzig: Johann Börner & Jakob Popporeich. Numan, Philips. 1604a. Historie vande miraculen die onlancx in grooten getale ghebeurt zyn door die intercessie ende voorbidden van die Heylighe Maget MARIA. Op een plaetse ghenoemt Scherpen-heuvel […]. Brussels: Rutgeert Velpius. Numan, Philippe. 1604b. Histoire des miracles advenuz n’agueres a l’intercession de la Glorieuse Vierge Marie, au lieu dict Mont-aigu […]. Brussels: Rutger Velpius. Numan, Philips. 1606a. Historia de los milagros que en Nuestra Señora de Monteagudo […] nuestro Señor ha sido servido de obrar. […] Traduzida aora de Frances en Romance. Brussels: Rogero Velpio. Numan, Philippe. 1606b. Miracles Lately Wrought by the Intercession of the Glorious Virgin Marie, at Mont-aigu […] Translated out of the French copie into English by M. Robert Chambers Priest, and confessor of the English Religious Dames in the Citie of Bruxelles. Antwerp: Arnold Conings. Petrarca, Francesco. 1600. Le Petrarque en rime françoise avec ses commentaires, traduict par Philippe de Maldeghem, Seigneur de Leyschot. Brussels: Rutger Velpius. Porteman, Karel and Mieke Smits-Veldt. 2008. Een nieuw vaderland voor de muzen. Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse letterkunde 1560–1700. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Schroeder, J.J. 1978. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Rockford: Tan Books. Soergel, Philip. 1991.‘Spiritual Medicine for Heretical Poison: The Propagandistic Use of Legends in Counter-Reformation Bavaria’. Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 17, 125–49. Tynley, Robert. 1609. Two Learned Sermons […] In the second, are answered many of the arguments published by Rob. Chambers priest, concerning popish miracles. London: W. Hall for Thomas Adams. Van Bleyswijck, Dirck. 1667. Beschryvinge der stadt Delft, betreffende des selfs situatie, oorsprong en ouderdom […]. Delft: Arnold Bon. Van Tiggelen, J.G.P.C. 1981. ‘Boekdrukkers 1572–1667’. In De stad Delft. Cultuur en maatschappij van 1572 tot 1667, edited by I. Spaander and R.A. Leeuw, 161–6. Delft: Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof. Voet, Leon. 1972. The Golden Compasses. A History and Evaluation of the Printing and Publishing Activities of the Officina Plantiniana at Antwerp. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Vangendt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. New York: Abner Schram. Vrancx, Cornelis Columbanus. 1601a. Den troost der zielen. Dat is: Maniere om heur wt het Vaghevier te helpen. Gent: Gaultier Manilius. Vrancx, Cornelis Columbanus. 1601b. Den tweeden cout der nichten inhoudende veel schoone Mirakelen van Maria ghebenedijdt. Gent: Gaultier Manilius. Vrancx, Cornelis Columbanus. 1602a. Van het heyligh ende volmaeckt leven van de ghebenedyde maeght ende moeder Gods Maria den derden cout der nichten […]. Gent: Gaultier Manilius Vrancx, Cornelis Columbanus. 1602b. Den vierde cout der nichten, leerende hoe datmen Maria best zal bidden […]. Gent: Gaultier Manilius. Ydens, Estienne. 1605. Histoire du S. sacrement de miracle. Reposant a Bruxelles, en l’Eglise Collegiale de S. Goudele. Brussels: Rutger Velpius. Ydens, Steven. 1608. Historie van het H. sacrament van mirakelen. Berustende tot Bruessel inde collegiale kercke van S. Goedele. Brussels: Rutger Velpius.

252 

Histories

Websites: Seed of the Woman: http://en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/Seed ​_of ​_ the​_woman. Nova Vulgata: http://www​.vatican​.va​/archive​/ bible​/nova ​_vulgata​/documents​/nova​ -vulgata​_vt​_ genesis​_ lt​.html​#3. Dutch Bible Translations: http://www​.bijbelsdigitaal​.nl/.

14 SCHLEIERMACHER [2019]

14.1 Introduction The lecture ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ (Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens’), which Friedrich Schleiermacher delivered at the Berlin Academy of Sciences in June 1813, is widely regarded as the beginning of modern translation theory. It also represents Schleiermacher’s most extensive statement on the subject of translation. To understand its core ideas, we need to know something of Schleiermacher’s views on language and on the nature of communication and understanding. We need to be aware of his work as a translator as well. The chapter, therefore, considers Schleiermacher’s writings on ethics and dialectics, and then addresses his translation of Plato. These different strands come together in his work on hermeneutics, which provides the key to the 1813 lecture on translation. The final paragraph adds a note drawn from Schleiermacher’s talks on psychology. Contextualising the 1813 lecture in this way will show that the traditional, decontextualised reading of it as presenting a choice between two opposing ways of translating (either the translator brings the foreign author to the reader or he/she takes the reader to the foreign author) is misguided. Even the apparent parallelism in the choice does not in fact exist. [In what follows, references not preceded by a name are to Schleiermacher’s work.] Today, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is known principally as a liberal theologian who also spoke in favour of the emancipation of women and of Jews. He became a public intellectual during the turbulent years of the Napoleonic wars in Europe and contributed substantially to what we now know as German Romanticism. In recent years, he has been increasingly appreciated as a philosopher. Early in his career, he read the Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers as well as Leibniz and Spinoza; he was heir to some of Herder’s ideas, a contemporary of Kant and Hegel and familiar with the work of figures such as Fichte and Schelling. DOI: 10.4324/9781003011033-18

254  Histories

Schleiermacher studied at the University of Halle in 1787–90 and worked for a while as a private tutor and pastor. In the years around 1800, in the Berlin salon of the multilingual Henriette Herz, he became involved with the leading Romantic writers and intellectuals of the time, among them the brothers Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel. He contributed to their short-lived but influential flagship journal Athenaeum and, at their instigation, published his first books (On Religion, 1799, and the effusive Monologues, 1800). He also undertook, initially with Friedrich Schlegel but then on his own, the translation into German of virtually the complete works of Plato; the first five volumes appeared as Platons Werke between 1804 and 1809, with a final sixth volume in 1828. He taught briefly at the University of Halle, but when, in 1806, the town was overrun by Napoleon’s troops and the university closed, he returned to Berlin, where he spent the rest of his life. While the French army occupied Prussia, Schleiermacher used his pulpit to preach resistance (Raack 1959; Vial 2005). In 1809, he played a role, alongside Wilhelm von Humboldt, in founding the University of Berlin. He served as its professor of theology and occasional dean for the next 25 years. He also became an active member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, delivering some 50 lectures and speeches there between 1811 and 1834. The 1813 lecture ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ was just one of these (1858; Nowak 2002). Schleiermacher wrote prolifically, but a large part of his output remained in manuscript until after his death. His collected writings were first published between 1834 and 1864. The authoritative critical edition of the complete work (Kritische Gesamtausgabe), currently in progress, is scheduled to comprise 65 volumes. Most of what Schleiermacher issued in print during his lifetime is concerned with theology, although, in terms of volume, the Plato translation looms large. For his thinking about translation, his writings on ethics, dialectics, hermeneutics and psychology are all relevant. Yet he himself did not publish anything at all, or very little, in these fields. He did, however, lecture on them at the University of Halle and then in Berlin. What we have on these subjects, therefore, are lecture notes, by himself or sometimes by students, as well as various outlines and drafts from different periods in his life. He lectured on ethics at Halle in 1804–05 and in Berlin in 1808 (before the university was formally opened), 1812–13, 1816, 1824, 1827 and 1832 (1981, xiv). The lectures on dialectics took place in Berlin in 1811, 1814–15, 1818–19, 1822, 1828 and 1831 (2002a, 1, xxv–xxvi). He gave lectures on hermeneutics, first at Halle in 1805, and then in Berlin in 1809–10, 1810–11, 1814 and 1819, and several more times in the 1820s and early 1830s (2012, xix–xxix). The lectures on psychology began in 1818 and were then held in 1822, 1830 and 1833–34 (1862, viii). The manuscripts that are unrelated to his lecturing are often difficult to date, and some contain later additions and comments. He appears to have drafted a book on hermeneutics around 1810 but lost the manuscript and started anew in 1819. He was working on a book on dialectics when he died in 1834. The writings on ethics and dialectics, in particular, are often forbiddingly abstract.

Schleiermacher [2019]  255

14.2 Ethics Chronologically, Schleiermacher’s interest in ethics came first. He planned to translate Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as early as the late 1780s, when he was only around 20 years of age. In the next decade, he published reflections on freedom, on sociability and on religious feeling, before composing a ‘Draft towards an Ethics’ (Brouillon zur Ethik) in 1805–06, as his lecturing on the subject got under way. His ideas, in this as in other domains, took shape around binary oppositions, such as real versus ideal, the individual versus society or particularity versus what he refers to as the shared ‘identity’ of human nature in all. The oppositions are not exclusive but mutually dependent and in constant interaction (which he calls ‘oscillation’), so that one concept cannot be thought without the other, and neither is ever present in an absolute form. Consciousness of one’s own self presupposes a contradistinction with those who are not part of this self. Human nature is the same everywhere but manifests itself differently in each person. We are open to the world around us but we also project our own cognitive schemata onto it. Recognising the specific thoughts that each of us entertains permits the positing of a level of ideal or pure reason. Human beings, for all their individuality, have a natural tendency to communicate and, thus, to form communities. Communication, for Schleiermacher, means that something that was internal to one person, for instance a thought, is exteriorised and subsequently interiorised as the same thought by someone else. The means to achieve this is language: what is expression for the speaker functions for the interlocutor as a sign. Successful transfer depends on a shared schematism, a common way of thinking (1981, 65, 2002b, 49). Communication enables sociability. It requires not only expression of one’s own personality but also a receptive openness to others, a willingness to contemplate difference. The task is paradoxical because, on one hand, it will never be possible to really grasp another person’s individual nature, while, on the other, a common humanity must be assumed (Berner 1995, 189–90). Sociability and individuality, although opposed, go together. The essence of sociability consists in respecting the other’s closed world while inviting it to open itself up and, simultaneously, making ourselves available to others keen to get to know us (‘das Wesen der Geselligkeit, welches besteht in der Anerkennung fremden Eigenthums, um es sich aufschlieβen zu lassen, und in der Aufschlieβung des eigenen, um es anerkennen zu lassen’; 1981, 265). The uniqueness of each person’s individuality, however, remains inaccessible to others and, hence, untranslatable; already the ‘Draft towards an Ethics’ equates Eigentümlichkeit (‘individuality’) with Unübertragbarkeit (‘non-transferability’) (1977, 361). The adjective, eigentümlich, and its associated noun, Eigentümlichkeit (‘individual, individuality’), will become key words in the 1813 lecture on translation. Nevertheless, because self-expression draws on language, and language is a means of communication, self-expression already contains within it a desire

256 

Histories

to be understood. In one sense, language also acts as a brake on idiosyncrasy. In a lecture on aesthetics, Schleiermacher notes that, as a shared property and a relatively fixed system, language is not well equipped to express either strict singularity or fluidity (‘die Bestimmtheit des Einzelnen’; ‘das in sich Wechselnde’); it takes a creative artist to force it to do that (1977, 403). Forms of sociability are determined primarily by language. Following Herder, Schleiermacher conceives of language as creating a bond, initially within the family, but then extending to the clan and, from there, to the nation. Nations and languages, like persons, have their own individuality (1981, 47, 2002b, 25). And because thinking and speaking are interdependent, communities speaking different languages also think differently. These differences constitute what Schleiermacher calls the ‘irrationality’ of language and of languages. The term, which is of prime importance and also appears in the 1813 lecture on translation (2002, 70; 2012a, 46), denotes the asymmetry and incommensurability between different ways of thinking and speaking (1830, 57). The ‘Draft towards an Ethics’ already referred to ideas in a work of art as being ‘irrational’ in that they resist understanding (‘daβ die darin enthaltene Idee irrational ist gegen das Verstehen’; 1977, 362), in a passage explaining the impossibility of ever reaching full understanding of another’s discourse. In his outline of dialectics of 1814–15, Schleiermacher speaks of the ‘irrationality’ of the individual person as being counteracted by the use of language as such (1988, 109) because, as we just saw, language is always shared with others and, as he puts it in a draft on ethics of 1812–13, it imposes a degree of commonality on even the most individual thought (1981, 68–9; 1977, 410). Irrationality, then, is not absolute but it increases as the distance between different languages and cultural traditions increases. If irrationality troubles the relatively leisurely type of communication at the heart of sociability, it also haunts the more purposeful form of dialogue that drives dialectics.

14.3 Dialectics Dialectics is concerned with the search for knowledge that would be both absolute and certain. The reasoning, in true German Idealist fashion, is that if individuals can gain a certain degree and kind of knowledge about a portion of the world, then the idea of complete knowledge that would be true to the whole world and shared by all can be posited. Knowledge as it resides in individual languages, Schleiermacher says in an Academy lecture in 1830, stands to absolute knowledge like refracted rays of light to light as such (2002, 675). Reason points the way toward such knowledge. Reason is universal, and all humans possess a fraction of it, each in their own way. While universal knowledge will always remain an unattainable ideal, it acts as a regulatory principle in that it must be aspired to. Indeed, in practice, ‘the whole history of our knowledge is an approximation to it’ (2002a, vol. 1, 149). This approximation has to start from concrete reality and real people and, therefore, from the recognition of difference, with the aim of reaching consensus. Taking

Schleiermacher [2019]  257

his cue from Plato, Schleiermacher conceives of dialectics as dialogue, an exchange of ideas (2002a, vol. 1, 81). The ideas themselves, as well as their exchange, require language. For the individual, knowledge that is more than a vague intuition or a jumble of impressions can become cogent knowledge only when it is articulated in language. Thinking is silent speaking, as Schleiermacher never tires of repeating. Knowledge becomes socially productive when it is shared with others. But communication, as we saw, is an uncertain undertaking. The search for perfect knowledge and consensus should, therefore, begin where the risk is lowest – that is, within one language. This is already difficult enough because other people’s thoughts remain fundamentally inaccessible to us. The difficulties increase exponentially when knowledge is negotiated across languages, as in every field of knowledge, different languages embody an ineradicable difference (‘eine unaustilgbare Differenz’) in ways of thinking (2002a, vol. 1, 403). Schleiermacher refers to Cicero to drive the point home. Compare, he says, the self-assurance with which Cicero writes philosophy in his native Latin with the apprehension he betrays when he is translating from Greek; in the latter case, he is like any other Roman, ‘for whom the value of the translated Greek remained foreign’ (‘ein Römer, dem der Werth des wiedergegebenen griechischen fremd war’; 2002a, vol. 1, 402). Like ethics, then, dialectics comes up against the irrationality of languages, and Schleiermacher supplies illustrations that are devastating for any concept of translation as the integral transfer of meaning or ideas. ‘No knowledge in two languages can be regarded as completely the same, not even [the concept of ] thing and A = A’ (‘Kein Wissen in zwei Sprachen kann als ganz dasselbe angesehen werden; auch Ding und A = A nicht’), he notes in the 1814–15 draft on dialectics (2002a, vol. 1, 98). He argues, in the same passage, that even mathematics, despite its language-independent notation, is thought differently in different cultural traditions. In one of his lectures on psychology, he adds similar examples, from the top and the bottom end of the linguistic spectrum. Different words for ‘and’, he explains with reference to German und, Latin et and Greek και (kai), are not equivalent because they have different usages, and the German word for God (Gott) differs from its Latin or Greek counterparts in that it is rarely used in the plural and then only to reflect foreign conceptions (1862, 173). The 1813 lecture on translation remarks, in the same vein, that not even the words ‘God’ and ‘to be’ are the same across languages (2002, 89, 2012a, 60). The incompatibility between languages grows the more distant they are. In the 1832–33 manuscript of his dialectics, Schleiermacher, clearly reflecting contemporary developments in comparative Indo-European linguistics (one of its pioneers, Franz Bopp, had been his colleague in Berlin since 1821), observes that, despite linguistic affinities stretching from Europe to India, the various local traditions are so different it is hard to find common philosophical ground. If this is true within the Indo-European sphere, what about cultures beyond it (2002a, vol. 1, 405–6)? Yet a universal language would not be the solution. Schleiermacher rejects the idea on several grounds. Its construction would be a logical impossibility, he

258 

Histories

argues, as agreement on it would have to be reached in existing languages, making the universal language redundant. In any case, linguistic differences are valuable in themselves because their sum total reflects the richness of the human mind (2002a, vol. 1, 404). Where a dead language such as Latin has been employed as a transnational vehicle, its use has remained restricted to a social elite and, lacking the vibrancy of a living tongue, it would struggle to accommodate unfamiliar or innovative modes of thought (1862, 179). In his 1811 lecture notes on dialectics, Schleiermacher mentions another alternative to deal with the irrationality of languages. It consists in focusing on broader discursive and conceptual issues rather than on the non-synonymy of individual items: ‘I cannot appropriate an alien singularity; I have to reconstruct it through the way the foreign concept is formed’ (‘Das Einzelne fremde kann ich mir nicht aneignen; aber ich soll es in der fremden Begriffsbildung nachconstruiren’; 2002a, vol. 1, 59). It may not be immediately clear what this means, but his own translation of Plato provides a clue.

14.4 Plato When he tackled Plato around 1800, Schleiermacher was already an experienced translator. Apart from the Nicomachean Ethics mentioned above, he had rendered Aristotle’s Politics into German, but the translation remained in manuscript. Also in the 1790s, he took to translating from English, first a travelogue by Mungo Park and then sermons by Hugh Blair and Joseph Fawcett, the latter comprising two volumes. But the translation of Plato was of a different order and occupied him for several years (Lamm 2000, 2005). Covering the virtually complete works of Plato (minus Laws and Timaeus), it became an epoch-making version not only for the quality of the rendering itself but also for the various introductions in which Schleiermacher offered comprehensive interpretations of the entire Platonic corpus (Schleiermacher 1996). These introductions were soon valued in their own right and appeared in English as early as 1836. His preparation for the task of translating Plato was meticulous. He established a chronology for the separate dialogues and sought to understand each dialogue in the context of all the others, and the work as a whole with reference to the individual dialogues. He also tried to grasp Plato’s relation to the Greek language of the time, arguing that we need to know where Plato was constrained by the language at his disposal and where, being an artist as well as a philosopher, he was creatively shaping it in unusual ways. Plato, Schleiermacher argued, was crafting a philosophical Greek discourse even though the language he had to use was not quite ready for it. At the same time, as a Greek thinker, he thought in Greek. Schleiermacher’s German translation sought to give the German reader an inkling of this linguistic complexity and of the coherence of the entire oeuvre ( Jantzen 1996). To achieve this, he followed two distinct routes. The first was captured by one of his friends, who read the translation in manuscript and

Schleiermacher [2019]  259

praised it for ‘snuggling up to the original, without overdoing it’ (‘Anschmiegung ans Original, mit Vermeidung des Punkthaften’; 2005, 166). Indeed, the translation often makes German follow the word order or even particular word formations of the Greek. These syntactic and morphological calques remind the reader, in German, that Plato is not a German but a Greek writer and that his way of thinking and expression differs from standard German ways. But Schleiermacher took another route, too. In some dialogues, Plato ironically plays with the Greek language, displaying his mastery of it. In the Cratylus, for instance, a dialogue largely devoted to discussions about language, he lets his alter ego, Socrates, invent all manner of spoof etymologies for particular Greek words. In his introduction to this dialogue, Schleiermacher admitted that this presented a challenge: ‘This etymological part became the translator’s cross, and it took him a long time to find a way out’ (‘Dieser etymologische Theil ist nun das Kreuz des Uebersezers geworden, und es hat ihm lange zu schaffen gemacht, einen Ausweg zu finden’; 1807, 20). He adopted a bold solution: the German translation fields a German-speaking Socrates who therefore offers ‘German German’ linguistic derivations (‘den einmal deutsch redenden Sokrates deutsches deutsch ableiten zu lassen’; 1807, 21); the spoof etymologies are played out entirely in German, without reference to Greek. In the case of proper names, however, this solution was not possible, and here the German version had to insert the Greek words between brackets. The coexistence of both types of solution within the same translation, Schleiermacher adds, should make the reader aware of the problematical nature of the whole exercise. The annotations following each of the translated dialogues dramatise these dilemmas. The annotations to Cratylus, for instance, frequently provide literal renderings from the Greek and then go on to explain that the translator has construed something equally fanciful using exclusively German words and derivations (for example, 1807, 460, 461, 466, 468, 472). In Phaedrus, the opening dialogue in Platons Werke, he operates along similar lines, on one occasion basing another mocking etymology on a poem by August Wilhelm Schlegel published in 1800, just a few years before Schleiermacher’s translation appeared in print and, thus, at the furthest possible remove from the world of Ancient Greek (1804, 101, 374; Hermans 2015, 87–88). The conspicuous anachronies show, in German, Schleiermacher’s understanding of Plato and of Plato’s relation to Greek while also counteracting the Greek-leaning flavour of Schleiermacher’s German in other parts of the translation.

14.5 Hermeneutics Shortly before the first volume of his Plato translation appeared in print, Schleiermacher remarked in a letter to his publisher that ‘not only was there much to be elucidated as regards Plato, but Plato was the right author to demonstrate understanding as such’ (‘Es ist nicht nur am Plato selbst gar Vieles aufzuklären, sondern der Plato ist auch der rechte Schriftsteller um überhaupt das Verstehen anschaulich

260  Histories

zu machen’; 2005, 3). If understanding Plato was a precondition for translating him, translating Plato afforded insight into the art of understanding. In 1805, within a year of the publication of the first Plato volume, Schleiermacher began to outline a general theory of hermeneutics (2003, l–li). Hermeneutics, in turn, supplies the most direct key to Schleiermacher’s pronouncements on translation, including the 1813 lecture. Hermeneutics, ethics and dialectics are closely interlinked. As social beings, humans seek communication and community; they desire to be understood even as they project their inalienable individuality. Dialectics sets absolute and certain knowledge as its goal but has to proceed from concrete, individualised knowledge and to build dialogue on difference. Difference is also where hermeneutics begins. Understanding must be actively sought so as to overcome misunderstanding or uncertainty (1977, 92; 1998, 227–28; 2012, 127). The danger of misunderstanding is smallest within close-knit units such as families, it is more or less manageable within one and the same language, and it is greatest across languages because ‘every language is the repository of a particular system of concepts and of making connections’, as he puts it in the ethics lectures of 1812–13 (2002b, 82; ‘in jeder Sprache ein eigenthümliches System von Begriffen und von Combinationsweisen niedergelegt ist’; 1981, 109). Negotiating these problems takes both discipline and imagination; hermeneutics is an art because it obeys certain rules, but there are no rules governing the application of the rules (1811, 38). Not every text presents a hermeneutic challenge. When language merely repeats what is already known, or when it is transparent as in ‘common discourse in business matters and in habitual conversation in everyday life’ (1998, 7; 1977, 76), hermeneutic effort is not required. The more language and thought are individual and original, however, the more hermeneutic effort and study are needed. Complete understanding will never be attained; hermeneutics remains an unending task, its outcomes forever conjectural (1977a, 41; 2012, 219). Full understanding, or what Schleiermacher in a lecture of 1829 calls ‘a heightened understanding’ (‘ein erhöhtes Verständnis’; 1977, 324), means understanding a discourse better than the speaker understood it himself because it brings to consciousness what remained unconscious to the speaker and makes explicit the speaker’s relation to the language (2012, 39, 75, 114, 128; 1998, 228, 266). Hermeneutic study is demanding because it has to take account of the relevant context, genre and period (1977a, 46; 1998, 231, 257). The level of difficulty increases the further we move away from our immediate surroundings. Only our native language is available to us in its naturally grown fullness; our access to utterances in foreign languages is inevitably fragmentary because, not having grown up in the foreign world, we can never acquire more than partial knowledge of their context (1977, 84). In a hermeneutics lecture of 1819 he remarks that ‘a person grows into his own language to such an extent that it is almost as hard to step out of one’s language as it is to step out of one’s skin’ (‘Der Mensch ist so hineingewachsen in seine Sprache, daß es nicht viel leichter ist, aus seiner Sprache, als aus seiner Haut herauszugehen’; 2012, 244).

Schleiermacher [2019]  261

The actual process of gaining understanding follows two paths simultaneously, which Schleiermacher calls grammatical and technical interpretation (2012, 75, 121; 1977a, 42); in later writings, technical interpretation is also called psychological or divinatory. The distinction reflects, on one hand, the interdependence of language and thought, and, on the other, the dual notion of language as both a suprapersonal system and a malleable instrument that creative individuals can bend to their will. The two approaches are complementary, but, methodologically, grammatical interpretation comes first (2012, 101; 1977, 69–70; 1998, 232). Whereas grammatical interpretation concerns the utterance as a specimen of language, technical interpretation eyes the person who speaks and their thinking (2012, 75–6; 1977, 68; 1998, 229). In grammatical interpretation, ‘a speaker is regarded entirely as the organ of language’, more particularly of the state of the language at the time the utterance was produced (1977, 85, 94; 1998, 230). Each language sets a limit to what can be said or thought in it. Technical interpretation proceeds as if one was trying to get to know the language from the speaker’s discourse (1998, 230); it seeks insight into the speaker’s individuality, and the linguistic expression of this individuality is what Schleiermacher calls style (2012, 102; 1998, 254–5; Pfau 1990). If grammatical interpretation investigates the state of the language at a given moment in its development and yields relatively certain knowledge, technical interpretation is both more dynamic and more speculative; it requires imaginative leaps on the part of the exegete who is now dealing with the innovations and transgressions of particular speakers imposing their will on the language and, through their interventions, forcing change on it. The complementarity between grammatical and technical interpretation appears also in what later became known as the hermeneutic circle: ‘One must already know a man in order to understand what he says, and yet one first becomes acquainted with him by what he says’ (1977a, 56; 2012, 25). What is probably the first printed statement of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic principles appeared in his Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (‘Brief Outline of the Study of Theology’) of 1811, a book concerned with the interpretation of canonical Christian works, especially the New Testament. The edition of 1811 was followed by a second, enlarged version in 1830. The New Testament was written in Greek, even though most Christians in later ages read it in translation. Jesus of Nazareth and his disciples, however, spoke Aramaic, and the Greek of the New Testament still shows the Aramaic palimpsest underneath it. Schleiermacher’s comments on these issues, in three short paragraphs, are telling: §16. No discourse can be fully understood except in the original language. Not even the most perfect translation overcomes the irrationality of language. § 17. Even translations can be fully understood only by someone who is conversant with the original language.

262  Histories

§18. Although the original language of the canon is Greek, much of it is translated directly from the Aramaic, and even more should be regarded as indirectly translated. (1850, 139–40) (§16. Keine Rede kann vollständig verstanden werden als in der Ursprache. Auch die vollkommenste Uebersezung hebt die Irrationalität der Sprache nicht auf. § 17. Auch Uebersezungen versteht nur derjenige vollkommen, der zugleich mit der Ursprache bekannt ist. §18. Die Ursprache des Kanon ist zwar griechisch, vieles aber ist unmittelbar Uebersezung aus dem Aramäischen, und noch mehreres ist mittelbar so anzusehen; 1811, 37) ‘Irrationality’, as the mark of difference, may not be absolute, but it cannot be wholly eradicated within a language, much less across languages, where equivalence does not exist. Translation cannot undo the irrationality of language. Strictly speaking, Schleiermacher notes in his draft General Hermeneutics of 1809–10, there are no synonyms even within the same language (2012, 94). Learning a foreign language, he notes in 1819, makes us ‘reduce’ foreign words to presumed mother-tongue equivalents, but this often ensnares us in errors (2012, 137–8; 1977, 112).The exegete seeking to understand a translation is, therefore, charged with interpreting the original as well as the translation and to appreciate the translation as an interpretation of the original. The reference to New Testament Greek being a translation of sorts shows that Schleiermacher is perfectly aware of hybrid language. The New Testament writers, he suggests, were relatively simple people. Except for Paul, they were not quite capable of fully exploiting the resources of Greek. Apart from spoken Aramaic, they also drew on the Hebrew of the Old Testament and infused old Jewish terms with new Christian meanings. In addition, the Greek they wrote often harked back to the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament (2012, 130; 1977, 158; 1998, 82). The exegete needs to weigh these dependencies and remain alive to what Schleiermacher calls ‘the language-forming power of Christianity’ in the New Testament (1998, 86; 2012, 124, 205; 1977, 162) because the novel ideas of a new religion demanded innovative speech (1977, 382). Historical hindsight often dulls the freshness of what was once new but has become mainstream; in a later addition to his hermeneutic manuscripts, Schleiermacher mentions Plato as just such a linguistic innovator, forging a written philosophical discourse out of everyday conversations in a manner that is hard for us moderns to appreciate (1977, 103). In a lecture of 1832, he broadens this out to the general statement that intellectual developments trigger linguistic change (‘wenn in einem Volke eine geistige Entwicklung vorgeht, so entsteht auch eine Sprachentwicklung’; 1977, 90). The combination of, on the one hand, the ‘irrationality’ of language and, on the other, the various factors which converge in singular ways in particular texts makes both hermeneutic understanding and translation challenging. This does not mean they are impossible. No-one can step outside their own skin, but, in interpreting

Schleiermacher [2019]  263

someone else’s thought, one must set one’s own thoughts aside in favour of the other person’s, as Schleiermacher stressed already in his earliest notes on hermeneutics (2012, 7; 1977a, 42); to do otherwise is to sacrifice the understanding of otherness to the pursuit of one’s own ends (1977, 213). In his very first lecture to the Academy, in 1811, he charged modern scholars of ancient thought with merely projecting their own ideas on the thinking of the ancients (2002, 33–4). But, as he recognised in a hermeneutics lecture of 1819, a special talent is needed to ‘think oneself into’ foreign languages (‘Es ist ein Talent, sich in fremde Sprachen hineinzudenken’; 2012, 244). It is a talent translators cannot do without.

14.6 ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ Schleiermacher delivered his lecture ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’ (‘Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens’) on two occasions at the Berlin Academy of Sciences, first to its philological section on 24 June 1813, then to the Academy’s full session on 3 July. The time was one of heightened national sentiment in the wake of Napoleon’s ignominious retreat from Russia six months earlier, and, indeed, Schleiermacher’s journalism in the spring and summer of 1813 was concerned almost exclusively with the political and military situation (Meding 1992, 38–45). There is no evidence he attached much importance to the lecture on translation or that it made any impact. He dashed it off in less than four days (2002, xxxii). On the evening of its first presentation, he spoke of it as ‘a rather trivial piece’ (‘ein ziemlich triviales Zeug’; 2002, xxxiii). He does not appear to refer back to it in any of his later writings. The text was printed in the Academy’s Transactions (which were not sent out for review) in 1816 and then in Schleiermacher’s posthumous Collected Works, but it remained forgotten until its reprint in Hans-Joachim Störig’s anthology Das Problem des Übersetzens (‘The problem of translation’) of 1963. The current high regard for it among scholars of translation is due to the work of Antoine Berman (1992) and Lawrence Venuti (2008, 83–98). The lecture amounts to neither more nor less than the application of hermeneutics to translation. From a hermeneutic point of view, translation is nothing special: it simply means the extension of hermeneutic principles from the intralingual to the interlingual. At the same time, it is very special because of the irrationality of language, which is at its most acute here, and because of the fact that, in order to articulate their understanding of the foreign text, translators have at their disposal only their own tongue as they address readers unfamiliar with the foreign tongue. Schleiermacher opens his lecture by pointing out that the term translation, broadly conceived, can cover both intralingual and interlingual renderings, but he restricts it to the latter, nevertheless. He also disposes of the oral interpreter (‘Dolmetscher’) in favour of the ‘translator proper’ (2012a, 44; ‘der eigentliche Uebersezer’, 2002, 68) who is concerned with written discourse. For the hermeneuticist, written discourse presents more of a challenge because, as Plato said in the Phaedrus, it can dispense with the presence of a speaker and does not permit

264  Histories

the kind of conversational exchange during which interlocutors can clear up misunderstandings. Written discourse, Schleiermacher notes, is also the proper medium of the arts and sciences – where science (‘Wissenschaft’) appears to mean primarily philosophy; later in the lecture, he cites Plato as a typical exponent of science (2012a, 60; 2002, 90). Schleiermacher associates the world of commerce with oral interpreting because, he says, the spoken word is the common currency there (2012a, 44, 2002, 68). But translating journalism and travel literature are also more like oral interpreting than like translation proper because in these genres the subject-matter is the sole concern, everyone is familiar with the things being referred to and the phrases used are no more than counters determined by law or convention, so speakers are readily understood (‘schlechthin verständlich’; 2002, 70). Clearly, Schleiermacher is talking about texts which hold no hermeneutic challenge and so have zero or minimum value in hermeneutic terms. Translating these texts is a mechanical exercise (2012a, 45, 2002, 70). Translation proper, then, is concerned with hermeneutically challenging discourse and thought. In these texts, the author’s individual way of seeing and of making connections (‘des Verfassers eigenthümliche Art zu sehen und zu verbinden’; 2002, 69) prevails, and ‘the author’s free individual combinatory faculties’ (2012a, 45; ‘das freie eigenthümliche combinatorische Vermögen des Verfassers’; 2002, 69) work on the language in such a way that substance and expression become inseparable. Schleiermacher’s use of ‘eigenthümlich’, a term familiar from his other work, is key here: between them, the adjective ‘eigenthümlich’ and the corresponding noun ‘Eigenthümlichkeit’ (he spells both with an ‘h’ in the middle) occur no fewer than 18 times in the lecture, an insistence obscured in the English translations (1977b, 2002c, 2012a), which distribute the terms over different words (‘particular’, ‘individual’, ‘peculiar’, ‘special’ and corresponding nouns). The subject-matter in texts of this kind ‘comes into existence only through being uttered and exists only in this utterance’ (2012a, 45; ‘erst durch die Rede geworden und nur zugleich mit ihr da ist’; 2002, 69) and we encounter ‘thought that is one with speech’ (2012a, 46; ‘der Gedanke […], der mit der Rede eins ist’; 2002, 71). Transplanting these texts – the shift from a mechanical to an organic metaphor is deliberate, and Schleiermacher consistently invokes organic metaphors when speaking of ‘proper’ translation (2002, 67, 70, 79, 80, 83, 92, 93) – poses formidable problems, for two reasons. One is the irrationality of languages (2002, 70), the non-existence of cross-lingual equivalence. The other recalls the dual orientation toward language that is present in every utterance worth hermeneutic attention. On one hand, all speakers are in the power of language, which has ‘preordained’ (2012a, 46; ‘vorgezeichnet’; 2002, 71) what can be thought and said in it. On the other, creative minds shape the ‘tractable’ (2012a, 46; ‘bildsam’; 2002, 70) material of language to their own designs. This dual orientation of utterances reflects the distinction between grammatical and technical interpretation in Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics. It is subsequently elaborated in exactly these terms in the first key passage in the lecture:

Schleiermacher [2019]  265

Now if understanding works of this sort is already difficult even in the same language and involves immersing oneself in both the spirit of the language and the writer’s characteristic nature, how much yet nobler an art must it be when we are speaking of the products of a foreign and distant tongue! To be sure, whoever has mastered this art of understanding by studying the language with diligence, acquiring precise knowledge of the entire historical life of a people and picturing keenly before him the individual works and their authors – he, to be sure, and he alone is justified in desiring to bring to his countrymen and contemporaries just this same understanding of these masterworks of art and science. (2012a, 47) (Wenn nun das Verstehen auf diesem Gebiet selbst in der gleichen Sprache schon schwierig ist, und ein genaues und tiefes Eindringen in den Geist der Sprache und in die Eigenthümlichkeiten des Schriftstellers in sich schlieβt: wie vielmehr nicht wird es eine hohe Kunst sein, wenn von den Erzeugnissen einer fremden und fernen Sprache die Rede ist! Wer denn freilich diese Kunst des Verstehens sich angeeignet hat, durch die eifrigsten Bemühungen um die Sprache, und durch genaue Kenntniβ von dem ganzen geschichtlichen Leben des Volks, und durch die lebendigste Vergegenwärtigung einzelner Werke und ihrer Urheber, den freilich, aber auch nur den, kann es gelüsten von den Meisterwerken der Kunst und Wissenschaft das gleiche Verständniβ auch seinen Volks- und Zeitgenossen zu eröffnen; 2002, 72). In this remarkable passage the hermeneutic project becomes the precondition for translating. Understanding in one’s own language is already hard if the dual orientation of a discourse to its language and to the peculiarities (‘Eigenthümlichkeiten’) of the individual author are taken into account. Understanding works in a distant tongue deserves even more to be called a high art (‘eine hohe Kunst’). This is so because a foreign language will never be available in more than fragmentary form: the exegete has not grown up in and with the foreign idiom and can, therefore, only ever grasp it partially and imperfectly, as an outsider. Becoming proficient in this most exacting division of the hermeneutic endeavour demands practice and dedication. Schleiermacher is emphatic on this point, rather more so than Susan Bernofsky’s English rendering suggests: this proficiency is acquired through studying the language not just ‘with diligence’ but with the greatest diligence (‘die eifrigsten Bemühungen’), and through detailed historical study, and through – the repetition of ‘durch…, und durch…, und durch’ is insistent – imaginative engagement with individual works and their authors. Only someone thoroughly versed in the art and travail of hermeneutics can dream of translating. And translating, in turn, consists in putting before the audience exactly that understanding of the foreign work which the translator has been able to achieve: the prolonged labour of ‘Verstehen’ (‘understanding’) results in an end product, ‘Verständniβ ’ (‘understanding’), which now has to be articulated in the translator’s language. Schleiermacher devotes most of the rest of the lecture to explicating what this means.

266  Histories

The task seems impossible, ‘an utterly foolish undertaking’ (2012a, 47). Translators have to make their readers understand (‘verstehen’, 2002, 72) not only the spirit of the foreign language (‘den Geist der Sprache’) in which the author felt at home (‘einheimisch’) and the latter’s particular (‘eigenthümlich’) way of thinking and feeling as it is articulated in that language, but they also need to intimate to their readers the understanding (‘Verständniβ’) they themselves have reached, the effort (‘Mühe’) it took to get there, the pleasure (‘Genuβ’) it yielded and the feeling of the foreign (‘das Gefühl des fremden’) that continues to inhere in the insight gained. The difficulty, specific to translation and consequent upon the hermeneutic engagement with the original, consists in the fact that, to give voice to all this and provide readers of a translation with a vicarious experience similar to their own, translators have only their own language. It is at this point, and after he has cleared away two alternatives, paraphrase and imitation, which he says both sidestep the challenge, that Schleiermacher posits the two well-known options open to translators: ‘Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer towards him’ (2012a, 49). The dichotomy, however, is not real. The second option is mentioned only to be dismissed. The first option is not what it seems either, as we shall see. Let us deal with the second option first. This method, bringing the author to the reader, would have the translator write what the foreign author would have written had he not been foreign. But, Schleiermacher argues, if the author had grown up in our tongue, he or she would have been a different person entertaining different thoughts. This option assumes that the same thoughts can be thought in two different languages and that, consequently, thinking and language can exist separately. Schleiermacher rejects this belief as an untenable ‘fiction’ (2012a, 61; ‘Fiction’, 2002, 91) and, in so doing, declares the very foundation of this method invalid. He contrasts it with his own conviction, which affirms the principle of the identity of language and thought as underpinning all understanding, all hermeneutics and, therefore, all translating (‘the inner, essential identity between thought and expression – and this conviction forms the basis for the entire art of understanding speech and thus of all translation as well’; 2012a, 56; ‘daβ wesentlich und innerlich Gedanke und Ausdrukk ganz dasselbe sind, und auf dieser Ueberzeugung beruht doch die ganze Kunst alles Verstehens der Rede, und also auch alles Uebersezens’, 2002, 85). It follows that the aim of the method of bringing the author to the reader is ‘null and void’ (2012a, 56;‘nichtig und leer’; 2002, 85), its applicability stands at ‘well-nigh zero’ (2012a, 59;‘fast gleich null’; 2002, 89), its practice mostly resembles either paraphrase or imitation, and so it does not even qualify as proper translation at all (‘dies würde streng genommen gar kein Uebersetzen sein’; 2002, 91). At best, renderings made in this vein can prepare the ground: a nation not yet ready for proper translation may use imitation and paraphrase to feed an appetite for the foreign (‘Lust am Fremden’) and thus pave the way toward a more general understanding (‘ein allgemeineres Verstehen’; 2002, 76). In fact, moving the reader to the author, the apparent opposite of the previous option, is equally impossible, but for a different reason. The translator can gain, at best, a partial, fragmentary understanding of the foreign author. With even the translator

Schleiermacher [2019]  267

denied full access, there can be no question of the reader being transported to the author.The point at which author and reader meet can only be the translator: The two separate parties must be united either at some point between the two – and that will always be the position of the translator – or else the one must betake himself to the other, and only one of these two possibilities lies within the realm of translation. (2012a, 49) (Die beiden getrennten Partheien müssen entweder an einem mittleren Punkt zusamentreffen, und das wird immer der des Uebersezers sein, oder die eine muβ sich ganz zur andern verfügen, und hiervon fällt nur die eine Art in das Gebiet der Uebersezung; 2002, 75). The alternative, which for Schleiermacher falls outside the realm of translation, would entail a reader becoming totally at home in the foreign language or that language enveloping the reader to such an extent that he or she became a different person (ibid.). It is, therefore, the translator who moves, taking the reader along, and both firmly stay within the confines of their own tongue. Translators act as hermeneuticists do: they work to attain the best possible understanding of the foreign text which, nevertheless, remains foreign, and then they have to find a way to communicate to the reader unfamiliar with the foreign language exactly that understanding. In the process of seeking understanding, translators will have moved some way towards the author, closer to the edge of their own tongue, so to speak. It is to this position, one foreign to the readers of the translation, that translators move their readers. This is the second key passage of the lecture: the translator endeavours through his labour to supply for the reader the understanding of the original language which the reader lacks. He seeks to communicate to the readers the exact same image, the exact same impression which he himself gained through his knowledge of the original language of the work as it is, and thus to move them to his own position, one in fact foreign to them. (2012a, 49) [the italicised word represents my correction of Susan Bernofsky’s translation, which, erroneously, has ‘foreign to him’, TH]. (ist der Uebersezer bemüht, durch seine Arbeit dem Leser das Verstehen der Ursprache, das ihm fehlt, zu ersezen. Das nämliche Bild, den nämlichen Eindrukk, welchen er selbst durch die Kenntniβ der Ursprache von dem Werke, wie es ist, gewonnen, sucht er den Lesern mitzutheilen, und sie also an seine ihnen eigentlich fremde Stelle hinzubewegen; 2002, 74–5). The hard-won familiarity with foreign works and authors sets translators apart from their compatriots. But the impression of the foreign work to be conveyed remains that gained by one who has diligently studied a foreign tongue

268  Histories

while remaining aware of its foreignness. True, there are those rare prodigies to whom no language feels foreign, but Schleiermacher views them as exceptions for whom the value of translation is nil (2002, 77–8). At the other end of the spectrum stands a plodding schoolboy understanding (‘schülerhaftes Verstehen’; 2002, 76), which lacks a sense of the whole and its coherence – lacks, that is, the kind of broader vision Schleiermacher had articulated in his Plato translation ten years earlier. Proper translation occupies the space between these extremes. It calls for an educated and dedicated translator proficient in the foreign language but for whom the foreignness of the foreign always remains (‘dem die fremde Sprache geläufig ist, aber doch immer fremde bleibt’; 2002, 78). The challenge for the translator is to deploy the translating language in such a way that it conveys to readers unfamiliar with the foreign language that particular sense of the foreign as it inhabits this specific work by this individual writer and as the translator, having looked over the fence, as it were, has apprehended it. Foreignness thus enters the translating language. This leads to Schleiermacher’s observations on translators creatively bending their language to the foreign tongue. The form which that bending takes recalls Schleiermacher’s Plato, which ‘snuggled up’ to the Greek original but left room for creative variation. Schleiermacher certainly does not mean strictly literal or metrical translation, which he dismisses as ‘one-sided’ (2012a, 52; 2002, 80). Rather, translators must be granted a degree of linguistic flexibility. Their discourse will, in any case, look less coherent than that of an original author who can build up a network of cognate keywords echoing one another across successive or related works (2012a, 52; 2002, 79). The remark echoes comments in the hermeneutic writings to the effect that we can only ever gain fragmentary knowledge of foreign cultures. Still, if the translating language is to accommodate the foreign ways of thinking embodied in the original, then the translator’s usage will have to be innovative. There is a wider, historical context as well. Schleiermacher projects the immature schoolboy grasp of the foreign on a national and temporal scale. In times when the educated part of a nation lacks a tradition of familiarity with foreign cultures, those who are ahead of their compatriots in dealing with the foreign cannot display their own more advanced understanding in their translations because they would not be understood (2012a, 50; 2002, 76). The comment recalls Schleiermacher’s own anxiety, in a letter of 7 January 1804, that the German public might not have been ready for his Plato translation (2005, 186). The conditions that enable proper translation to flourish, then, are twofold. It takes a language supple enough to be bent as required (French, caught in its neoclassical vice, will not do; 2002, 82, 92; 2012a, 54, 62) and a community of readers willing to accept unfamiliar linguistic usage. When these two conditions are met, a national translation culture can develop. The rhetorical finale of the 1813 lecture envisages a German nation obeying an ‘inner necessity’ to transplant foreign works, cultivating its national language ‘through extensive contact with the foreign’ and serving as a repository of the global treasure trove of culture (2012a, 62; 2002, 92). Schleiermacher concedes that this vision has yet to materialise, but, he reckons, ‘[a]

Schleiermacher [2019]  269

good beginning has been made’ (ibid.). In a footnote to the printed version of the lecture, he mentions Johann Heinrich Voss’s four-volume translation of Homer (1793) and A.W. Schlegel’s nine-volume Shakespeare (1797–1810) as shining examples of that beginning. No doubt he saw his own Plato translation as deserving a place in this list as well.

14.7 Approximation The historical projection in the concluding paragraphs of Schleiermacher’s 1813 lecture may look like a mere nationalistically inflected rhetorical flourish. It is more than that. In his 1812–13 manuscripts on ethics – contemporaneous with the lecture on translation – Schleiermacher notes how cross-cultural ‘community’ may arise from border traffic and is epitomised by language mixture (‘Sprachmengerei’; 2002b, 87; 1981, 115), something the cultural centre will normally disavow and oppose. Nations being unequal, one will usually exert and the other undergo influence. However, if national feeling in the receiving nation is sufficiently strong, it will assert its individuality, and ‘this tendency to bring national particularity comparatively to consciousness gives rise to a community of translations’ (‘Aus dieser Tendenz aber die Nationaleigenthümlichkeit comparativ zum Bewuβtsein zu bringen, entsteht die Gemeinschaft der Uebersezungen’; ibid.). Because it engages with the foreign as foreign, and puts the receiving language to work to create room for it, translation enables comparison, highlights cultural difference and serves as an index of national identity. The somewhat later lectures on psychology add a twist to these ideas, complementing the notion of translation as marking difference with that of convergence and of approaching an ultimate goal. Discussing issues of linguistic diversity and cultural intertraffic, and using terminology reminiscent of his work on dialectics, Schleiermacher observes that ‘as soon as several languages are in contact with one another, they also grow closer’ (‘Sobald dagegen mehrere Sprachen in Verkehr mit einander sind, so sind sie auch in einer beständigen Approximation begriffen’; 1862, 179). As each develops, the exchange of knowledge among them intensifies and becomes easier, and the project of total and shared knowledge begins to look a little less utopian. And this, he claims, is already happening. ‘The idea of knowledge that would not be locked away within the borders of one language but would be the same for everyone, arises from the simple fact that this approximation is steadily being realised’ (‘Die Idee von einem Wissen, welches nicht in den Grenzen einer bestimmten Sprache eingeschlossen sondern ein gleiches für alle sein soll, beruht lediglich darauf, daβ diese Approximation immer mehr realisirt wird‘; 1862, 180). But the road will be long, and just as the 1813 lecture on translation ended with a reminder of how much still needed to be done, so the lectures on psychology, too, stress the role of translation as marking at once the huge distance still to be travelled, the enormity of the task and the way in which it might nevertheless be accomplished: If we remind ourselves how far we are still from this goal, and how little we have achieved in resolving the modes of thinking of other peoples into

270 

Histories

our own, then we are a long way from claiming that the representational capacity of any language has evolved to the point where it could absorb foreign modes of thought. In translating from one a language into another the differences in the respective component parts become particularly clear, giving rise to the obvious task of balancing them out through a special art of combination and thus to make the content similar, which can be done to a certain degree. But this latter operation only then becomes truly approximative, when one simultaneously thinks in the other language, so that one would have to set as one’s task the totality of thought in one language in order to translate from one language into another. (Bedenken wir nun, wie weit wir noch von diesem Ziel entfernt sind und wie wenig wir darin geleistet haben, die Denkungsweise verschiedener Völker in die unsrige aufzulösen, so sind wird auch noch sehr weit entfernt zu behaupten, daβ die Darstellung in irgend einer Sprache so weit gediehen sei, daβ andre Denkweisen darin aufgingen. Bei der Uebertragung einer Sprache in die andre treten nun die Differenzen in den Elementen am meisten hervor, so daβ die natürliche Aufgabe entsteht, diese durch eine besondere Art der Combination ausgleichen und so den Gehalt ähnlich zu machen, was bis auf einen gewissen Grad sich lösen läβt. Aber die lezte Operation wird dann erst recht approximativ, wenn man in der andern Sprache zugleich denkt, so daβ man also die Totalität des Denkens in einer Sprache sich zur Aufgabe machen müβte, um aus einer Sprache in die andre zu übersezen; 1862, 180–1) Translation brings difference to the fore because it cannot help proceeding from one word to another and inevitably runs into non-synonymy, the irrationality of language. The solution is to shift attention from the individual ‘component parts’ to broader discursive and conceptual issues, as Schleiermacher had indeed recommended in his 1811 notes on dialectics, quoted above: ‘I cannot appropriate an alien singularity, I have to reconstruct it through the way the foreign concept is formed’ (‘Das Einzelne fremde kann ich mir nicht aneignen; aber ich soll es in der fremden Begriffsbildung nachconstruiren’; 2002a, vol. 1, 59). This is a hermeneutic task, which only then truly contributes to the convergence of disparate knowledges when it aspires – a forlorn aspiration – to think the totality of thought in the foreign tongue. While the task cannot be accomplished, it can be done to a degree, and, as he states in an 1830 Academy lecture on ethics, cross-border intellectual traffic resembles both the multilingualism of individuals and ‘the resulting if never more than approximative appropriation of what has been thought in other languages’ (‘die daraus entstehende immer nur approximative Aneignung des in fremden Sprachen gedachten’; 2002, 675). In his dialectics, Schleiermacher envisaged a metaphysical ideal of absolute and true knowledge shared by all, and he sketched a dialogical path within and across languages leading, in the fullness of time, to that ultimate consensus. Here, translation takes the role of that dialogue. Translation remains mired in difference, but it can be lifted to a higher plane. The utopia that translation entertains is that of a final convergence of modes of thinking that would abolish the irrationality of language. It is an almost Benjaminian vision.

Schleiermacher [2019]  271

Bibliography Arndt, Andreas. 2013. Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Arndt, Andreas. 2015. ‘Schleiermacher (1768–1834)’. Translated by Anita Mage. In The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Forster and Kristin Gjesdal, 27–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berman, Antoine. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by S. Heyvaert. New York: State University of New York Press. Berner, Christian. 1995. La philosophie de Schleiermacher. Herméneutique, dialectique, éthique. Paris: CERF. Berner, Christian. 2015. ‘Das Übersetzen verstehen. Zu den philosophischen Grundlagen von Schleiermachers Vorlesung “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens”’. In Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Question of Translation, edited by Larisa Cercel and Adriana Şerban, 43–58. Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Cercel, Larisa and Adriana Şerban, ed. 2015. Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Question of Translation. Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Hermans, Theo. 2015. ‘Schleiermacher and Plato, Hermeneutics and Translation’. In Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Question of Translation, edited by Larisa Cercel and Adriana Şerban, 77–106. Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Jantzen, Jörg. 1996. ‘Zu Schleiermachers Platon-Übersetzung und seinen Anmerkungen dazu’. In Über die Philosophie Platons. Die Einleitungen zur Übersetzung des Platon (1804– 1828), edited by Peter Steiner, xlv–lvi. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Lamm, Julia. 2000. ‘Schleiermacher as Plato Scholar’. The Journal of Religion 80, 206–39. Lamm, Julia. 2005. ‘The Art of Interpreting Plato’. In The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, edited by Jacqueline Mariña, 91–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mariña, Jacqueline, ed. 2005. The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meding, Wichmann von. 1992. Bibliographie der Schriften Schleiermachers. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Nowak, Kurt. 2002. Schleiermacher: Leben, Werk und Wirkung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Pfau, Thomas. 1990. ‘Immediacy and the Text: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Theory of Style and Interpretation’. Journal of the History of Ideas 51, 51–73. Raack, R.C. 1959. ‘Schleiermacher’s Political Thought and Activity, 1806–1813’. Church History 28, 374–90. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1804. Platons Werke. Vol. 1, 1. Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1807. Platons Werke. Vol. 2, 2. Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1811. Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums. Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1830. Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums. 2nd revised ed. Berlin: G. Reimer. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1836. Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato. Translated by William Dobson. Cambridge & London: J. and J.J. Deighton & J.W. Parker. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1850. Brief Outline of the Study of Theology. Translated by William Farrer. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1858. Aus Schleiermacher’s Leben. In Briefen. 2 vols. Edited by Wilhelm Dilthey. Berlin: G. Reimer.

272  Histories

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1862. Psychologie. Aus Schleiermacher’s handschriftlichem Nachlasse und nachgeschriebenen Vorlesungen. (Sämmtliche Werke 3, 6. Literarischer Nachlaβ, 4.) Edited by L. George. Berlin: G. Reimer. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1977. Hermeneutik und Kritik. Mit einem Anhang sprachphilosophischer Texte Schleiermachers. Edited by Manfred Frank. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1977a. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Edited by Hanz Kimmerle. Translated by James Duke and Jack Forstman. Missoula: Scholars Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1977b. ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’. Translated by André Lefevere. In Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig, edited by André Lefevere. 67–82. Assen & Amsterdam: Van Gorcum. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1981. Ethik (1812/13) mit späteren Fassungen der Einleitung, Güterlehre und Pflichtenlehre. Edited by Hans-Joachim Birkner. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1988. Dialektik (1814/15). Einleitung zur Dialektik (1833). Edited by Andreas Arndt. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1996. Über die Philosophie Platons. Die Einleitungen zur Übersetzung des Platon (1804–1828). Edited by Peter Steiner. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 1998. Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings. Edited and translated by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2002. Akademievorträge. (Kritische Gesamtausgabe I, 11.) Edited by Martin Rössler. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2002a. Vorlesungen über die Dialektik. 2 vols. (Kritische Gesamtausgabe 10, 1–2.) Edited by Andreas Arndt. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2002b. Lectures on Philosophical Ethics. Edited by Robert Louden. Translated by Louise Adey Huish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2002c. ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’. Translated by Douglas Robinson. In Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche, 2nd ed., edited by Douglas Robinson, 225–38. Manchester: St Jerome. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2003. Kleine Schriften 1786–1833. (Kritische Gesamtausgabe I, 14.) Edited by Matthias Wolfer and Michael Pietsch. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2005. Briefwechsel 1803–1804. (Kritische Gesamtausgabe V, 7.) Edited by Andreas Arndt and Wolfgang Virmond. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2012. Vorlesungen zur Hermeneutik und Kritik. (Kritische Gesamtausgabe II, 4.) Edited by Wolfgang Virmond. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2012a. ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. In The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 43–63. London & New York: Routledge. Störig, Hans-Joachim, ed. 1963. Das Problem des Übersetzens. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed. London & New York: Routledge. Vial, Theodore. 2005. ‘Schleiermacher and the State’. In The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, edited by Jacqueline Mariña, 269–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

INDEX

actor-network theory 4, 66 Aelian (Claudius Aelianus) 196 Aeschines 216 Aeschylus 88 agency 165, 173, 178, 179 Albert (Archduke) 233–4, 236, 238, 248 Allan, P.S. 221, 229 Amos, Flora Ross 187 Amyot, Jacques 221, 224, 226 Andrews, Clarence 152 Androzzi, Fulvio 239 Andrushko, Valerie 85 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 76 Apter, Emily 4, 82, 91 Arblaster, Paul 249 architextuality 51, 153 Aristeas 48 Aristotle 15, 16, 62, 66, 82, 223, 255, 258 Arrojo, Rosemary 75, 126 Asad, Talal 43 Asselijn, Thomas 28 attitude 7–8, 37, 155–7, 160, 173, 174, 176, 178 Augustine of Hippo 217 authentication 49, 70 author function 23, 121 Averroes (Ibn Rushd) 62, 82 Bachet de Méziriac, Claude Gaspar 227 Bachmann-Medick, Doris 43 Bakker, Matthijs 2, 32, 43, 123 Bal, Mieke 45, 132, 147 Balbano, Bernardina da 239

Baron, Hans 225 Barthes, Roland 120, 148 Bartsch, Renate 102–4, 106 Bass, Marisa 236, 248 Bates, E. Stuart 41 Baudoin, Jean 192, 198 Baumann, Uwe 227 belles infidèles 28, 190, 199, 227 Bembo, Pietro 246, 249 Benjamin, Walter 74, 271 Berghes, Guillaume de 235, 237 Berman, Antoine 263 Berner, Christian 255 Bernofsky, Susan 265, 267 Besamusca, Bart 158 Betanzos, Juan de 85–7 Biel, Gabriel 246, 249 Binns, J.W. 229 Blair, Hugh 258 Blasius, Joan 28 Boccaccio, Giovanni 40, 170 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 26, 27, 110–15, 121–3, 126, 217 Boitet, Reinier 238 Bok, Jan Marten 238 Booth, Wayne 132, 176 Bopp, Franz 257 Borges, Jorge Luis 62, 82 Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 26, 40, 116 Bowen, Karen 248 Brockey, Liam 86, 87 Brome, Alexander 168 Bruder, Gail 175 

274 Index

Bruni, Leonardo 224–5 Bruyère, Jean de la 239 Bruyère, Mathias de la 239 Buckley, Walter 100, 103 Buijnsters, P.J. 29 Buzzoni, Marco 83 Caesar, Gaius Julius 189 Calhoun, Craig 125 Calvin, Jean 26 Canisius, Petrus 246 Carlyle, Thomas 159 Carrasquer, Francisco 135, 137–9, 141, 143–4, 147 Carrington, Samuel 206 Cassandre, François 202 Cassin, Barbara 4, 82, 91 Catherine of Siena 246 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 192, 239 Chamber, Anthony 244–6 Chambers, Robert 235, 249 Chan, Albert 87 Chapman, George 86, 196, 197, 199, 200, 202, 227 Charles (Duke of Croÿ and Aarschot) 243, 249 Charles I 156 Chatman, Seymour 132, 133, 147 Chesterman, Andrew 5, 58, 72, 74, 75 Cheung, Martha 75 Cheyfitz, Eric 66, 125 Christopherson, John 225–6, 228 Chrysoloras, Manuel 218 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 26, 186, 192, 195, 212, 213, 216, 220–1, 226, 229, 257 Clark, Herbert 59, 154, 172, 173 Clemente, César 235, 249 Clifford, James 2, 32, 76 cluster concepts 4, 74–7 Cochelet, Anastase 236 code-switching 164, 169–71 Cohn, Dorrit 7, 170, 175 Colletet, Guillaume 200–1 communication 3, 53–5, 58, 66, 69–70, 74, 83, 101, 104, 115, 132, 172, 175, 255; cross-cultural 68, 119 complexity 5, 8, 9, 58, 68, 100, 105–7 compliant reading 168 conduit model of communication 53, 69–70, 74, 83 Congreve, William 189 Conings (Conincx), Arnout (Arnold) 235 Conrart, Valentin 201 convention 5, 71, 101–3, 111, 114–16, 140, 164

Coornhert, Dirck Volckertszoon 26, 126, 247 Copeland, Rita 216–18 Coppens, C. 245, 248 copyright 50, 52, 130, 164, 171 Coseriu, Eugenio 223 Costerus (De Coster), Franciscus 239 Courcelles, Etienne de 187 covert translation 73, 150, 154, 155 Coward, Noel 16 Cowley, Abraham 188, 191, 199–201 Creech, Thomas 168 Crosland, Maurice 198 Culler Jonathan 67 Curtius, Ernst Robert 185 Cyprian (saint) 227 Dante Alighieri 18 Darwin, Charles 159, 160 Dausqueius, Claudius 236 David, Jan ( Joannes) 236, 239 Davis, Kathleen 74 Davis, Paul 152, 156 De Baïf, Lazare 191, 192 De Buck, Adrianus 27, 110–15, 126 De Fuyter, Lion 189, 205 De Geest, Dirk 5 De Landtsheer, Jeanine 236, 237, 245, 248 De Man, Paul 61 De Nave, Francine 248 De Soto, Andres 239 decomposition 175, 177 definition of translation 66–7, 81 deictic shift 172, 175, 177 Deken, Agatha (Aagje) 29, 137 Demosthenes 224 Denaisius, Peter 236 Denham, John 152–3, 156–7, 188, 190, 198–201 Derrida, Jacques 16, 17, 20–1, 31, 37–9, 69, 81, 83, 133–4, 148, 165 Descartes, René 20, 134, 136 descriptivism 1–2, 5, 8, 30, 43, 69, 97–8, 100, 106, 116 dialectics 256–8 Díaz-Diocaretz, Myriam 126 Dickens, Charles 172 discordant narration 7, 170–1, 175 discordant translation 7, 170–1, 174, 177 discursive presence 20, 132, 138, 146, 151 displacement 6, 23, 118, 133, 140; see also first-person displacement documentary translation 241 Dolegius (Vander Dolegen), Daniel 248 Dolet, Etienne 189–90, 225, 226, 228

Index  275

Donck, Maarten see Duncanus, Martinus Donne, John 192, 224 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Michailovich 18, 19, 23, 35, 36, 121 Douwes Dekker, Eduard 18, 21, 135, 142 Dryden, John 73, 152–3, 168, 184, 186–9, 194, 200–2, 204 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste 187, 189, 194, 203, 206, 239 Du Bellay, Joachim 184, 185, 198, 200, 204, 206, 211–12, 214, 224, 227, 228 Duchan, Judith 175 Duerloo, Luc 234, 248 Duerloo, Marc 234 Duncanus (Donck, Verdonck), Martinus (Maarten) 246 Dunster, Samuel 168–9, 171, 174–6 Eagleton, Terry 67 E.B. 192 echoic speech 156, 157, 161, 174, 179 edgework 178 Edmonds, Clement 189 Edwards, John 105 Edwards, Roy 134, 137–9, 143–4, 147 Egerton, Clement 169–71, 174–6 Eisengrein, Martin 246, 249 Elyot, Thomas 194, 227 entanglement 2, 6, 32, 43, 84, 87, 90 epistemology 41 equivalence 18–19, 36, 48–50, 69–70, 72, 88, 98–100, 105, 116, 118–20, 122, 150–1, 199 Erasmus, Desiderius 15, 41, 81–2, 92, 219, 221–3 Esposito, Elena 61 Estienne, Charles 197 ethics 58, 76, 120, 164, 174, 179, 217, 223, 254–7 ethnocentricity 33 ethnography 2, 42–5, 124–6 Euripides 221 Eusebius Pamphilus 218, 226, 229 Eutropius 192 Evans-Pritchard, Edward 44, 124 Even-Zohar, Itamar 106 Fanshawe, Richard 190, 198, 199 Farnese, Alexander 239 Fawcett, Joseph 258 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 253 first-person displacement 72, 165, 167, 171, 177 Fischer, Michael 2, 33 Fleming, Abraham 192, 196

Florio, John 6, 193 Fludernik, Monika 176 Folkart, Barbara 19, 36, 133, 147–8 form of translation 7, 58–60 Fossa, Lydia 85 Foucault, Michel 23, 121, 126, 148 Fowler, Roger 165, 176 Fowles, John 147 frame, framing 167, 169, 170, 172, 177–8, 241 Frank, Anne 50–1, 57, 59, 61 Frank, Armin Paul 159 Freud, Sigmund 61 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 16–17, 61 Galle, Cornelis 240 Gardin de Mortaigne, Louis du 236 Garros, M. Roland see Roland Garros, M. Geertz, Clifford 76, 83–4, 124 Genette, Gérard 51, 132, 142, 147 Gernet, Jacques 44 Gerrig, Richard 59, 154, 172, 173 Gillis, Marcus Antonius 219 Giora, Rachel 175 gist translation 72, 155, 173 Glareanus, Henricus 219 Gmelin, Hermann 184 Godeau, Antoine 201 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 159 Goffman, Erving 173 Gohorry, Jacques 224 Golding, Arthur 192, 196 Goodman, Nelson 173 Gouanvic, Jean-Marc 116 Gournay, Marie de 200 Grice, Paul 72, 176 Griffiths, Gordon 225 Grimald, Nicholas 195 Grotius (De Groot), Hugo 187 Guarini, Battista 190 Guez de Balzac, Jean-Louis 201 Guillerm, Luce 184, 185, 188 Gutt, Ernst August 58, 72, 155 Gymnick, Jan 195 Hall, Arthur 153 Hallett, Nicky 249 Halliday, M.A.K. 157, 158, 160 Halverson, Sandra 4, 67, 73 Harington, Thomas 197 Harriot, Thomas 85–7 Harris, Brian 19, 36, 130–1 Hartog, François 42 Hartogh Heijs van Zouteveen, Herman 160

276 Index

Hasenmüller, Elias 246, 249 Hatim, Basil 106 Haward, Nicholas 192 Heal, Bridget 249 Healey, John 187, 198 Hegel, Friedrich 253 Hegeman, J.G. 160 Heidegger, Martin 37, 165 Hennebert, Frédéric 206 Herder, Johann Gottfried 88, 253, 256 Herman, David 177 Hermans, Theo 4, 9, 10, 25, 68, 70, 71, 77, 88, 89, 91, 111, 151, 161, 165, 179, 220, 259 hermeneutics 9, 16–17, 45, 89–90, 259–68 Hermes 17 Herodotus 42 Herz, Henriette 253 Hesiod 204 Hewitt, Lynne 175 Heyns, Zacharias 203, 206 Hill, Donna 48 Hjort, Anne Mette 102, 105 Hobbes, Thomas 153–4 Holland, Philemon 188 Holmes, James 97–8 Holt, William 249 Holyday, Barten 184, 187, 190, 193, 196, 202, 203, 227 Homer 153–4, 199, 203, 269 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 26, 168, 171, 174, 186, 212, 219 Horguelin, Paul 220, 221, 224, 227 Hoskin, Keith 216 Hoven, René 112 Hovius, Joannes 237 Hovius, Matthias 234 Howell, James 192, 198 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 88, 254 Humphrey, Lawrence 224 Hunston, Susan 158 Hutcheon, Linda 175 Huygens, Constantijn 28, 189, 192–4, 197, 205–6, 223 Hyrd, Richard 188 Ibn Rushd see Averroes imitation (imitatio) 8, 29, 114, 168, 183–7, 220–1 inference model of communication see stimulus and inference model instrumental translation 241 intertextuality 3, 39, 51, 70, 178; translation-specific 61, 152, 154 irony 156, 159, 161, 174–5

irrationality of languages 256, 262–3 Isabella Clara Eugenia (Infanta) 233, 235, 238, 239 Iser, Wolfgang 61, 63 Jakobson, Roman 20, 31, 37, 66, 73, 83 Jameson, Fredric 63 Jamyn, Amadis 203 Jansen, Jeroen 8 Jantzen, Jörg 258 Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus) 15, 32, 81–2, 214–16, 218, 221, 223, 226, 229 John Scotus Eriugena 218, 223 Johnson, Mark 74 Jones, Richard Foster 192, 194, 195, 197 Jonson, Ben 189, 194, 196, 203, 224 Junius, Franciscus (François du Jon) 200–1 Justinian 220 Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) 187, 202 Kaf ka, Franz 18 Kant, Immanuel 253 Kast, F.E. 100 Katz, Jerrold 83 Kazantzakis, Nikos 18 Keightley, R.G. 218, 219, 229 Kinley, James 153 Kinsley, Helen 189, 194 Kinsley, James 189, 194 Kitagaki, Muneharu 190, 193, 194, 202 Knight, I. 193 Knowles, Edwin 239 Koller, Werner 68, 98 Korpel, Luc 29 Krog, Antjie 163 Kundera, Milan 18 La Fontaine, Jean de 39 La Pinelière, Guérin de 192 Ladborough, R.W. 205 Lakoff, George 74 Lalement, Jean 224 Lambert, José 30 Lamm, Julia 258 Lathrop, Henry Burrowes 188, 196, 198 Latour, Bruno 66 Le Clerc, David 235 Leach, Edmund 43, 124 Lefevere, André 4, 30, 74, 117, 225 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 253 Leiner, Wolfgang 185, 205 Lemaistre, Antoine 227

Index  277

Lessius, Leonardus 235 Levý, Ji ř í 40, 177 Lewis, David 5, 101–2 Lianeri, Alexandra 62–3 Libanius of Antioch 221 libertine translators 190, 198, 200, 202, 204, 227, 228 Lipsius, Justus 112, 165–8, 174–6, 188, 232–47 literalism 8–9, 184, 186, 190, 202, 210–28 Littau, Karin 23, 121, 148 Littré, Emile 39 Liu, Lydia 88 Liu, Yu 87 Livy (Titus Livius) 195, 224 Lope de Vega Carpio, Félix 189 López García, Dámaso 222 Lotman, Yury 32 Louis XIV 28, 111 Lowe-Porter, Helen 39 Lucian of Samosata 193, 202 Luhmann, Niklas 3–5, 45, 52–5, 61, 63, 101, 103, 115, 116, 119, 123 Luis de Granada 238, 239 Luis de León 219, 221–3 Luke, David 39 Luther, Martin 15 Lyell, Charles 159, 160 Madrigal, Alfonso de 218–19, 222, 223 Malherbe, François de 190, 227 Mamphrasius, Wolfgang 236 Manetti, Gianozzo 224, 225 Mann, Thomas 39 Manteo 86 Marcus, George 2, 32, 76 Martín de León, Celia 74 Martin, James 158, 168, 178 Marvell, Andrew 153 Marx, Karl 61 Mason, Ian 106 Matthiessen, F.O. 6, 188, 193 Maturana, Humberto 61 Maurice of Nassau (Prince of Orange) 234 Maximilian of Austria (Archduke) 243 McFarlane, John 69 Meding, Wichmann von 263 Mehlman, Jeffrey 38 Meijer Drees, Marijke 28 Meng Tzu 44 Merton, Thomas 109 metalanguage 8, 32, 76, 183, 185, 204, 225 metaphors of translation 2, 8, 18, 23, 29, 35, 66, 73–4, 119, 121, 183–203 metaphrase 73, 220

metempsychosis 202–4 Michelangelo 59 Milton, John 153 Minucius Felix, Marcus 190, 199, 200 Miraeus, Aubertus 237 Miraeus, Joannes 234, 235, 237 modality, modulation 7, 157–60 Montaigne, Michel de 6, 193 Mooyaart-Doubleday, B.M. 50–1, 61, 62 More, Thomas 188 Morel, Jean de 211 Moretus, Jan ( Joannes) 232–7 Morillo, Gregorio 220 Moroni 48–9 Mossop, Brian 59, 60 Multatuli 21, 134–7, 141, 142, 147, 148 Munday, Jeremy 65, 168 Naaijkens, Ton 2 Napoleon Bonaparte 263 narrative 131–4, 145–6 narrativity 6, 8, 21, 22, 45, 129, 131–4, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 145–6, 147, 165, 170, 176, 179, 232, 237 narratology 6, 131–2, 167, 179 Needham, Rodney 44, 124 Nelson, Eric 153, 154 Newmark, Peter 69 Nida, Eugene 69 Nil Volentibus Arduum 28–9, 40 Niranjana, Tejaswini 24, 117 Noh, Eun-Ju 156 norms 3, 5–6, 36, 40–1, 57, 70–3, 98–107, 109–11, 119, 120, 123, 130, 185; competing 106; content of 40, 71, 103–5, 116; different kinds of 107, 117; regulatory force of 103; regulatory vs. constitutive 113; as shared, mutual or reciprocal expectations 71, 102, 111 Norton, Glyn 218, 219, 224, 225, 229 Nowak, Kurt 254 Nugent, Elisabeth 188 Numan, Philips 166–8, 170, 174–6, 232, 234–45, 247, 248 Nussbaum, Laureen 50–1, 61, 62 Ogilby, John 153 Oversteegen, J.J. 22 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 26, 27, 188, 189, 191, 201 Page, David 160 Painter, William 195 Paker, Saliha 75

278 Index

Pammachius 214 paraphrase 72, 73, 113–14, 168, 190, 202, 218–21, 227, 266 paratext 7, 9, 61, 154, 165, 168, 177, 178, 242 Park, Mungo 258 Pasquier, Etienne 188 Payne, John 40–1 Peirce, Charles Sanders 68–9 Peletier du Mans, Jacques 184, 185, 188, 204, 212–15, 219, 222, 229 Pels, Andries 28 Perrot d’Ablancourt, Nicolas 188, 190, 199–202, 205, 206, 227, 229 Persius (Aulus Persius Flaccus) 187, 189, 190, 227 Persuitte, David 48 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 186, 239 Pfau, Thomas 261 Phaer, Thomas 194 Phelan, James 176 Philip II 233 Philips Willem of Orange 248 Philo of Alexandria 225 Piatti, Girolamo see Platus, Hieronymus Pigman, G.W. 184–6 Pindar 191, 199 Plantin, Christopher 232, 237 Plato 9, 88, 90, 253, 254, 257–60, 264, 268, 269 Platus (Piatti), Hieronymus (Girolamo) 246, 249 Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secundus) 188, 190 Plutarch 192, 221 Pollard, Alfred 195 Poltermann, Andreas 5, 111, 115 polysystem 107 Porphyry 217 Porteman, Karel 238 positioning 7, 27, 151, 158, 164–70, 174, 176 Prasad, G.J.V. 75 Pratt, Mary Louise 84 Prendergast, Christopher 4 presence see discursive presence Prince, Gerald 132 prototype theory 4, 73–4, 76 provisionality of translation 51, 52, 91 Pseudo-Longinus 186 Pym, Anthony 60, 68, 70, 72, 151, 165 Pythagoras 203 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) 29, 186, 187, 193, 201 quotation 19, 59, 130, 154, 155, 172–3

Raack, R.C. 254 Raleigh, Walter 86 Reddy, Michael 69 re-enactment 57, 59, 116, 151, 153, 154 Relevance theory 58, 70, 72, 83, 154–6, 174 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn 28, 110 Rener, Frederick 220 repeatability of translation 50–2 reported speech 7–8, 154–5, 171–5, 177 retranslation 3, 25, 39, 51, 52 Reuter, Paul 49 Rhodes, Neil 86 Ribera, Francisco de 246, 249 Ricci, Matteo 44, 86–7 Richard of St Victor 246, 249 Richards, I.A. 44 Rigg, J.M. 40–1 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 132, 147 Robinson, Douglas 48, 73, 126 Roemers Visscher, Anna see Visscher, Anna Roemers Roland Garros, M. 135–41, 143, 147 Ronsard, Pierre de 203 Rosales Sequeiros, Xosé 161 Roscommon, Earl of (Wentworth Dillon) 201, 203 Rosenzweig, J.E. 100 Ruggieri, Michele 86–7 Ryle, Gilbert 76 Sacré, Dirk 245, 248 Salel, Hugues 188 Salluste du Bartas, Guillaume de see Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste Salmon, Vivian 86 Sambucus, Johannes 219 Santoyo, Julio-César 219, 220, 222 Sauvage, Denis 224 Savile, Henry 203 Schäffner, Christina 71 Schegel, Friedrich 253–4 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 253 Schiavi, Giuliana 6, 147, 178 Schinckel, Bruyn Harmensz 232, 236, 238 Schinckel, Harmen 238 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 253, 259, 269 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst 5, 9, 62–3, 83, 88–92, 253–70 Schottus, Andreas 220–1, 224 Schroeder, J.J. 241 Schwanitz, Dietrich 100 Schwarz, Werner 186, 197, 217 Searle, John 38

Index  279

Sebillet, Thomas 184, 195, 204 second-order observation 3, 45–6, 56, 57, 60–3 Segers, Winibert 147 self-definition 6, 24–5, 27, 41 self-description 30, 32, 56 self-presentation of translation 18, 116 self-reference 24, 41, 54, 57, 117–18, 178; linguistic 132–4, 145 self-reflexiveness 2, 3, 32, 45, 63, 75–7 self-regulation 5, 101 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 26, 184, 189, 192 Serres, Michel 66 Shakespeare, William 16, 269 Shelton, Thomas 239 Sherburne, Edward 189, 202 Sidney, Philip 245 Siebenhaar, Willem 134, 137, 139–41, 143–4, 147 Simeone, W.E. 198 Simeoni, Daniel 116 Simpson, Paul 157 Skinner, Quentin 41–3, 122 skopos theory 70 Smith, Joseph 48–50 Smits-Veldt, Mieke 238 Snell-Hornby, Mary 73, 98, 106 social systems theory 3–4, 52–8, 70, 115; translation as a social system 55–8, 60 Soergel, Philip 249 Sonnemans, Gerard 158 Sophocles 191 Sötemann, A.L. 142, 148 speech act theory 41, 42, 122 Sperber, Dan 83, 156, 174 Spingarn, J.E. 199, 224 Spinola, Ambrogio 235 Spinoza, Baruch de 253 Stackelberg, Jürgen von 184 Stainhöwel, Heinrich 195 Stanley, Thomas 189 Stanley, William 244–5, 249 Stanton, W.F. 198 Stanzel, Franz 132 Stapylton, Robert 184, 187, 202 Starter, J.J. 206 Stecconi, Ubaldo 68–70 Steiner, George 16, 30, 66, 74, 153 Steiner, T.R. 185, 190, 191, 196, 198, 199, 201–3, 227 Sternberg, Meir 172 stimulus and inference model of communication 53, 70, 83 Stockwell, Peter 177, 178 Störig, Hans-Joachim 263

Stradling, John 188 Sturge, Kate 43 subject-position 6, 40, 50, 164, 165, 167, 173, 175 superstition 190, 205, 222, 227 Sylvester, Joshua 192, 194 system theory 100–1; see also social systems theory Tabucchi, Antonio 72 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius 190, 199, 203 tactical reading 168, 178 Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina 155, 173 Tambiah, S.J. 33 Tasso, Torquato 220 Ten Kate, J.J.L. 159–60 Tende, Gaspard de 227 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) 26, 197 T.G. 196, 203 Themistocles 192 Theophrastus 187, 198 thick translation 76–7 Thompson, Geoff 158 Thomson, George 236 Thucydides 200, 202 Tolstoy, Leo 169 Toury, Gideon 4, 5, 30, 69–71, 99–100, 118 translatability 51, 62–3, 81, 83, 196–7 translator function 23, 24, 120–2 Trivedi, Harish 75 Tutu, Desmond 163 Tymoczko, Maria 4, 75, 77 Ullmann-Margalit, Edna 102 untranslatability 4–5, 20, 52, 81–92, 133, 255 Van Baren, J. 160 Van Bleyswijck, Dirck 238, 248 Van de Pol, Barber 39 Van den Broeck, Raymond 98 Van den Tempel (or Tympel), Olivier 243 Van Ghistele, Cornelis 25–6 Van Gogh, Vincent 38 Van Gorp, Hendrik 116 Van Hoogstraten, François 126 Van Mander, Karel 26–7 Van Oosterwijck, Albert (or Ælbert) 166–8, 170, 175, 176, 232, 236–48 Van Oosterwijck, Volckerus 238 Van Tiggelen, J.G.P.C. 238 Van Winghe, Nicolaus 243 Van Wynbergen, Everdine Huberte 21, 135, 142–3, 147, 148

280 Index

Vander Dolegen, Daniel see Dolegius, Daniel Vanderheyden, J.F. 188, 195, 198 Varela, Francisco 61 Vega, Miguel Ángel 223 Velpius, Rutger 232, 235, 236, 239, 248 Venuti, Lawrence 2, 4, 60, 91, 263 Verdonck, Maarten see Duncanus, Martinus Vermeer, Hans 161 Vermeer, Johannes 110 Vial, Theodore 254 Vigenère, Blaise de 220 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 26, 152–3, 157, 184, 187, 194, 201, 202, 211, 212, 222 Visscher, Anna Roemers 203, 206 Vives, Juan Luis 188, 223 Voet, Leon 234 voice 6, 20–3, 36, 37, 39, 129–46, 174 Vondel, Joost van den 27, 28, 187, 189, 191–2, 198, 204–6 Vorsterman, Lucas 248 Vos, Isaac 189 Vos, Jan 28 Voss, Heinrich 269 Vrancx, Cornelis Columbanus 241, 246–7 Vulgate 15 Wadensjö, Cecilia 151 Wakabayashi, Judy 75 Wanchese 86

Warners, J.D.P. 201 Weber, Samuel 38–9 Weinberg, Bernard 204, 205, 225 Wessel van Boetzelaer, Rutger 203 Westerbaen, Jacob 194 White, Hayden 42 White, Peter 158, 168, 178 Wierzbicka, Anna 67 William (the Silent) of Orange (Prince) 234, 248 Wilson, Deirdre 83, 156, 174 Wilson, Thomas 192 Wilss, Wolfram 98 Wingens, Marc 234 Winkler, T.C. 160 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 76 W.L. 187 Wolff, Elisabeth (Betje) 29, 137 word-for-word translation see literalism Worp, J.A. 28, 223 Wright, James 194 Wycliffe, John 6 Xenophon 201 Ydens, Steven (Estienne) 239 Yeltsin, Boris 19, 129–30, 146 Zangre (Zangrius), Peter (Petrus) 248 Zuber, Roger 185, 192, 199, 204, 206, 227, 229 Zwijck, Jan 244, 247