Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “Translation is the most intimate act of reading.” With this thought, Bilal, who is currently working on a translation of a novella, thinks about the process of translation and the role of the translator.
( I )
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “Translation is the most intimate act of reading.” I couldn’t agree more. I’m repeatedly amazed by the extent to which words, phrases and sentences take on a new, more complex meaning in my mind as I attempt to transfer them from one language to another. The translator reads, writes and then worries about being read.
( II )
For the last several months, I’ve been feeling like Leila Aboulela’s protagonist in The Translator: I’m “pushing” and “moulding” a less dominant, in many ways distant, language “into English,” “trying to be transparent like a plane of glass not obscuring the meaning of any word.” But English isn’t always quite as hospitable a language as one would like it to be. It’s not always as expressive; sometimes it’s too concise.
Most, if not all, translators worry about the prospects of getting their translations published: was it really worth all the trouble and effort? Even if/when that translation gets published, the translator has little control over its afterlife. Let’s take an example.
( III )
Far surpassing the number of entries documented in the now thoroughly dated print bibliographies of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre, the late French polymath’s 1969 lecture, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” is currently available as “What is an Author?” in more than a dozen English-language editions. Editors, however, have been far from consistent in their presentation of the text.
The most recent reprint I’ve come across doesn’t even mention the fact that the text is a translation, let alone properly acknowledging its translators. What might appear to be a minor omission represents, I think, a much larger dilemma: the gradual and often intentional erasure of both translation’s and the translator’s mark.
But the life of the translator begins at the end of the essay; her name is relegated, perhaps justifiably so, to a secondary status. And yet, there is perhaps an extent to which translators and editors can be thought of as co-authors of a translated text—even if, despite a rendering of its content and form, that very text is made to appear as though it were never borne across.
Further Reading
Aboulela, Leila. The Translator. Oxford: Heinemann, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968.
Foucault, Michel. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 63.3 (1969): 73-104.
Ricoeur, Paul. On Translation. Trans. Eileen Brennan. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. New York: Routledge, 1995.
