Several of the essays picked up on the question of how translation should be done, and in particular with how the knotty issues involving staying 'true' to original language and context, even at the risk of then being disorienting and inaccessible for readers of the translation ('source oriented' translation) vs substantially transferring the piece being translated into the new language and context, which in turn brings the risk of straying far afield from the original ('target oriented' translation). Unsurprisingly, this seems a vexed issue and very much a live one amongst translators; I've thought about this before, and never been able to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion. The other recurring theme is a belief in the capacity of art to transcend its situatedness and reach a kind of universal truth, and to speak on matters which extend beyond its specific time - and the corresponding belief that art can and should be judged according to whether it still has the ring of truth to it for future generations, whether or not it was 'understood' at the time.
Some specific ones which interested me for various reasons:
- Brian Castro ('Making Oneself Foreign') leads off with a compelling defence of the view that translation is critical to the health of literary culture and society at large.
- James Grieve ('Working With The Demented') gives an account of some fairly dramatic conflicts between translators' approaches to doing Proust (À la recherche du temps perdu and the unsatisfactory results that were thereby reached...and once again I find myself unable to avoid Proust.
- Russell Grigg ('Englishing Lacan') provides a workmanlike (but interesting since it wasn't that long ago that I was wrestling with Lacan, sometimes consulting the French where I couldn't make sense of the English) rundown on some of the difficulties involved with translating Lacan into English.
- Rita Wilson ('Eco Effects'), in the course of a lucid review of Umberto Eco's views on translation, gives what seems to be a pretty good summary account of the state of the field.
- Kevin Hart ('Tracking The Trace') writes a neat essay - but more on that below.
- J M Coetzee ('Roads To Translation'), whose picture also graces the front cover (unsurprising, I guess, since he's the big 'name' of the issue), gives an interesting account of how the relationship between author and translator can work.
- Adrian Martin ('Empathy Connection') presents a brief meditation on the nature of translation (actual and potential) in western cinema and art, pausing to express reservations about Lost In Translation (reminding me that the reason I so often rail against him is that he so often complains about films I like a lot) but doing so in a way which I'm forced to admit is fair enough, even if it strikes me as so much accurate missing of the point.
As to the stories and poems, these were, unsurprisingly, a mixed bag. Easily my favourite of the bunch is Hélèna Villovitch's "La Plaine-Voyageurs", translated from the French by Chris Andrews. It sort of meanders along, not really seeming to be about anything in particular but always glimmering with the suggestion that something is about to happen, and then, in some mysterious way that I can't pinpoint, the final 'stanza' - the last three paragraphs - cap it off perfectly, making you feel as if you've just read something clear-sighted and true, but that the clarity and truth somehow glitters between the lines and sunk in without your realising it or, even now that it has happened, being able to articulate it. Hunh...anyway, these are those magic-working final paragraphs, though they really need the whole of what comes before them for their full impact:
I still work in La Plaine-Voyageurs. In the metro, I feel short of breath. Nothing too serious, but since a woman is staring at me, she might as well get her money's worth. I pretend to have a twitching fit, discreet enough not to alarm anyone except my audience of one, who can't take her eyes off me. That'll teach her to stare. A guy asks me for money. I don't give him any, because I've got just enough on me to buy MY cigarettes. I hate everyone. I clasp my bag tightly all the way, as if I were scared someone would snatch it. At the Gare du Nord, I pretend to be absent-minded, so I can jump off at the last moment and bump into the people who have started to get on.
On the platform, I listen to the message broadcast over the transit authority's loudspeakers. It explains that if someone tries to help you buy a ticket from a vending machine, they're probably trying to rob you. Nice atmosphere, I think. Don't accept help from anyone. That makes me feel better.
In the train, I don't know how to look natural. So I do the opposite. I pretend to be interested, astonished, fascinated by the view. The factories! The high-rise flats! The derelict community gardens! But no-one is looking at me. So I let my mind go blank.
In their contemporary disenchantedness and dislocation, not to mention the mild whimsy, that series of reflections reminds me of some of the better things that people used to come up with on open diary, back when I both maintained one of the things and read other people's. (I'm thinking of one in particular, which struck me as sufficiently zeitgeisty at the time for me to copy out an extract on to an obscure section of my wall, along with details of authorship: "i'm cold in class. i raise my hand, say stupid things, and try not to run over pedestrians on the way home." - haven, "i swear", 18/9/02.) Which is probably apt, given that, as the note at the end of the story explains, Villovitch is concerned to explore what Georges Perec called the 'infraordinary' - "what is going on when nothing is happening. Or when nothing seems to be happening, since attending to the infraordinary can shift our ideas of what counts as an event and what is worthy of attention". May sound a bit boring, but if you're reading in the right kind of way (as I suppose I was), it's anything but. Don't know what my chances of finding other of her stuff in translation are, but will have to try to remember to look around.
The only other of the 'creative' works which particularly struck a chord was Kevin Hart's rendition of a poem by eighth century Chinese poet Li Bo, "The Trader's Wife". In his essay, which precedes the poem, Hart writes interestingly about why poets are attracted to translating other poets, working in his own 'poetic development', questions of voice and 'trace' (via Derrida), and the mysterious 'effect' of poetry which seems somehow to, just sometimes, itself be translatable. The essay ends with the following comments: "Who speaks in 'The Trader's Wife'? I hear my voice, but behind it I can hear another's. I hope it is Li Bo's." And, well, whatever is happening with Hart's translation of the poem, I must admit to getting a bit of a chill as I sat outside at Retro that afternoon, reading its plaintive, understated narrative of love and separation.
If it seems as if I've had a lot to say about this issue, there are probably three reasons: first, I've been carrying it around for quite a while now, reading it in the gaps between other things, which has given it a chance to settle in; second, the subject matter is, as I started off by saying, immensely interesting; and third, well, there's some really good content in it.
