Michael Cooperson gave such an engaging talk and was so personable, especially when we met with him before the lecture. He told us then that translators "are his favorite people." We talked a bit about translating living authors versus dead authors, which connects quite nicely to the readings for this week. Cooperson mentioned in his talk that "being a translator is about hiding," but when you're working with an author from hundreds of years ago like Al-Hariri, it's difficult to "hide" behind authorial intent or feedback, because that kind of information simply isn't available to you, and author can't interfere or assert control in the translation process.
While it is ultimately Al-Hariri's text, Cooperson's voice is conspicuous throughout the translation. It seems that when we talk about reading a domesticated versus a foreignized translation, one of the criteria we point to most often is whether or not readers are conscious that they are reading a translation; whether or not the reader is conscious of the translator's interference. Cooperson's translation complicates this dichotomy in that, while the language is hyper-domesticated and localized, the reader's attention is constantly being drawn to the fact that this is a translation and is required to do a lot of work to understand its mechanisms, thanks to the glossaries and explanatory notes. Cooperson made an important distinction at the beginning of his talk: that domestication of language is not the same as domestication of content. I think Cooperson has managed to demonstrate the difference between these two forms of domestication in his Impostures, and I wonder if there's something about ludic or Oulipo-adjacent texts that allows them to demonstrate so clearly that a piece of writing can be "domesticated" while simultaneously requiring the translator to be extra "visible." I hope that makes sense... I'm still parsing it out myself.
Isabelle Vanderschelden's article on authority in translation was full of wonderful anecdotes, and drove home the point that it is difficult to make any generalized claim about authorial intervention being good or bad for the translator and the target text. I'm working on translating a novel for my capstone project, and I agree with Nadine Stabile that the author can serve as a sort of "extra safety net" for an early-career translator (26). I hope to reach out to the authors of the novel I'm translating soon, so I can ask them some questions. That said, I think it would be daunting and ultimately stifling to receive a thirty-page list of instructions like the one Umberto Eco sent out to his translators for Foucault's Pendulum.
It seems that the success (or failure) of such translator-author collaborations often comes down to the temperament and ego of the author. The collaboration between Juliet Carpenter and Minae Mizumura seems to have been particularly fruitful. From Carpenter's examples, it seems that Mizumura truly wanted to collaborate, building on Carpenter's work with thoughtful guiding questions and suggestions ("Could we do something more with the description of the moonlight?") (4). On the other hand, some authors like Singer and Kundera seem to view translators as a necessary evil, and clearly would prefer to simply do the translation themselves if they were so able. It would be hard to achieve a fruitful collaboration with an author who already views you and your work with suspicion, and feels from the start that their job is to correct your errors.
Maggie
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