In-postures, Cooperson & Kroll

Maybe we could call untranslatability a spurious ontological description of a source text, one which stems from a previous and often unanswered question: who is defining a text in terms of its putative untranslatability and why?  Cooperson masterfully exposes how the concept is a belated addition to the field of translation, rooted more in political than semantic or artistic interests.  Seeing the translator as fundamentally a writer and the practice of his craft as an invitation to creativity, I’d willingly fit within the parameters of translation works which a more Procrustean thinker (Kroll, for example) would probably exclude.  The poems of Tracy Smith, for example.  Or the Genji of Arthur Waley.  Kroll, praising an elite squadron of persons who can maintain a rigorous allegiance to form while writing deft English verse, presents a narrow objective criterion which, so it seems, stands upon an even narrower subjective one.  Above all, Kroll touts what he likes and only afterwards finds an intellectual rationale—in the language of theory and criticism—for this spontaneous, affective response.  Since I happen to like Waley enormously—at least the fragments I’ve encountered—and consider him a consummate prose stylist, I’m willing to call his performance a translation, despite his fondness for transporting the action to an English drawing room, and could probably, if tasked with writing an essay, drum up enough intellectual verbiage to legitimize my preference.  By the same token, when Kroll cites the stilted verse of intellectuals or reduces Waley’s Genji to a work for incurious readers by an imperious writer, he’s building an intellectual exoskeleton around his personal taste.  My hunch is that if he likes a text as an autonomous work in English, any scholarly case against wooden poetry or free translation would dissolve, if not transmute into encomium.

By which I hope to segue to an admission.  I admire but do not care for Cooperson’s Impostures.  For me, they inhabit an esoteric plane near Finnegan’s Wake, their lingual virtuosity—the chief triumph of the work—making that same work almost inaccessible.  It’s ironic, moreover, that after citing in his introduction the ponderous chore of reading previous translations overladen with explanatory material, Cooperson’s own Impostures would be deeply impoverished without the glossaries and endnotes by which the reader must, as it were, translate his translations into English.  Following Kroll’s lead, I could point to the gulf between the source text and Cooperson’s translation, arguing the latter is an adaptation at best, but such an intellectual formulation would only reiterate the point.  Cooperson’s text, as a work in English derived from Arabic, doesn’t move me.  Any argument concerning literal/free, foreignization/ domestication, is and has always been secondary, an effect rather than a cause.

-Josh