Cooperson/Al-Hariri's Impostures

I thought Paul Kroll's essay "Translation, or Sinology" was fantastic, and it was able to articulate some of my frustrations with translation theory. The following quote, to me, was the most important part of the piece: "I do not believe that good translation can be the product of declared precepts or avowed manifestos that are created in a theoretical safe-space apart from actual practice...If one looks closely at the actual work of any translator who pronounces on tenets ex cathedra, one invariably finds that sooner or later he perforce violates his own principles. This really is not to be wondered at: language and the meanings it carries are too febrile and mercurial to be controlled by rules, no matter to what end of the spectrum of translational possibilities one leans. We all end up, most of the time, working mainly in the vast middle ground between extremes" (564-5). 

Kroll's assertion that translators most often work in the "middle ground" connects to his assertion that "faithful translation" and "stylish translation" are set up in a false binary, and that it isn't necessary to reject one method in favor of the other. Similarly, I think it is much easier to make sweeping proclamations about domestication versus foreignization when one theorizes about, but does not practice, translation. When I translate, I never work from either extreme, nor do I ever really begin a translation project with a clear intention to completely domesticate or to completely foreignize a text. Translation, to me, is problem-solving, and a rigid approach never serves me when I actually come up against these problems in practice. Many of my decisions in the moment simply come down to what feels or sounds right within the broader scope of the piece, and I don't assign these binary labels to it until I've finished the translation and am able to evaluate it as a whole. 

In the same vein, Kroll recognizes that it is possible to write both faithfully and with style. I think the two qualities have often been falsely set in opposition. I thought back to Tracy K. Smith's Yi Lei translations a lot while reading this essay, because this piece has helped me pinpoint what exactly I disagreed with in her work. To me, Smith created a dilemma for herself where there was none: either produce a faithful translation or create a powerful, pleasing poem.  I don't see why it isn't possible to do both! Replacing a lotus with a rose, as Kroll writes (or in Smith's case, changing it to a cloud) is an unfortunate result of the idea that two languages or cultures are too "distant" from one another to be able to represent each other faithfully in translation. 

Now, with regards to the Impostures, and in keeping with my opinion that these broad generalizations are unhelpful when talking about translation, I'm going to throw what I just said out the window and praise Cooperson for his innovative translation of Al-Hariri's text. It may seem contradictory to dislike Smith's departures from the text but admire Cooperson's, but I think it comes down to context; Al-Hariri's text was meant to play with and stretch the Arabic language, so a successful English translation must do the same.  Different texts require different approaches, and if Cooperson were to translate the Arabic "faithfully," the text would lose its ludic quality, the very thing that makes it remarkable (as we saw in his examples of previous Maqamat translations). 

Cooperson's Impostures were a delight to read, especially because I'm currently writing about the translation of Raymond Queneau's Exercices de style for Professor Vincent's class and I can very clearly see the text's influence on Cooperson's translation. It's amazing to me that, since the French translation of Al-Hariri didn't retain the language play of the original, that Queneau, Perec, and other Oulipians presumably came up with their constrained writing without any awareness of the resemblance it bore to his work. It's easy to see this resemblance through Cooperson's translation, since he openly admits to using Oulipian writing as inspiration for his version. Independent of the English translation, though, the trick of writing with only dotted words vs. undotted words reminds me a lot, as Cooperson said, of Perec's La disparition, written entirely without the letter E—as well as the follow-up, Les revenentes, in which the letter E is the only vowel. You can see Perec's influence on Cooperson as he renders the dotted/undotted sections as poems both excluding the letter O and using the O as much as possible. 

Maggie