Esther Allen & Jeremy Tiang

 “The World is not Enough”

As JT scrutinizes the first noun in the formula “world literature,” perhaps we could do the same with the second.  That is, a reader comes to a purportedly literary text with a notion—narrow or broad, exclusive or inclusive, generic or nuanced—of what constitutes a work of literature and how it ought to operate.  Reading in translation seems to add another inescapable layer of assumptions.  If a book is not only literary but originates in another tongue, how is that book to behave?  Should it retain a diluted form of its foreignness under the heading of exoticism?  Should the translator expunge those extraneous elements in order to deliver a text that’s accessible, readable, and more like home?  I don’t see JT denouncing any and all preconceptions but rather suggesting that, since presuppositions are as inevitable to thought as postulates to Cartesian geometry, we think critically and sensitively about what our presuppositions might be.  Literature from another place may be, unexpectedly, a sure strategy for learning something about oneself.

 

“Fictions of the Foreign”

After Bellos aptly demonstrates how foreignness is often a construct absent from the original and thus endogenous to a translation, I’m curious how to translate a foreignness that is a significant feature of the source text.  That is, in contrast to Kafka who, for a German reader, might sound unique, maybe odd, but not foreign, I’m thinking of the chapter of The Magic Mountain written entirely in French and, as such, foreign to Thomas Mann’s German-speaking readers.  A translator working into English could maybe achieve a commensurate effect leaving the chapter untouched, but would this foreign element necessarily disappear from a translation into French?  I also recall Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in which a first-person narrator speaks by authorial design in what one critic calls a “sublimely butchered English.”  A translator working out of English would not only have to identify the delicate artistry with which the English is misshapen but also render the foreignness of that voice with ingenuity and wit.

 

A Fable for Now

How many times does this fable reinvent itself over the course of its seven movements?  I’m astonished firstly by the depth and the range of this protoplasmic imagination, never reluctant to rewrite its own rules in its search for new meanings.  Be it a firearm that appears ex nihilo and the subsequent revelation a pistol is packed with tranquilizers rather than bullets, or the transition in the final scene from a man purportedly leading a tour to the discovery he is marooned, the last living exemplum of a nearly extinct human race, sinking into a desperate, one-sided conversation with himself, A Fable for Now is a story that turns repeatedly on its own axis in order offer, along with bountiful laughs, an urgent reconsideration of the present.

 

A visit from Esther Allen

What to do when a multifaceted word, one without a direct equivalent in the TL, also happens to be a leitmotif in the original?  As EA adroitly points out, the Spanish esperar is a polysemous, versatile word.  To wish, to expect, to hope, to wait, to wait for—the meaning of the verb shifts with context.  Or rather, the context determines which of these possible meanings simultaneously present comes to the fore.  And in this way, given that EA has opted for expectation whereas the translation into German emphasizes the wait, I don’t think one translation is therefore superior to or more faithful than the other but rather that each brings out a different shade, a unique texture of the meaning tacit in the original, revealing like a prism (EA’s image) the multidimensional architecture of any work of literature, as if the text were hoping/wishing/expecting/waiting that an able translator would shed some light.  If we are willing to suppose that literature translated into English enriches the works already present in English letters, it would seem to follow that a translation can remake the context in which its own original is read.

 

Josh