A feminist named Boris?

I was especially interested in a pair of things Boris said in passing.  The first (to paraphrase from memory, aided by my notes) is that the translator of course enriches the text wherever he can.  It’s a view contrary to what Gregory Rabassa calls the silk purse mistake, the error of rather than translating a text, trying to improve it.  While Rabassa seems leery of any intervention proceeding from the translator’s imagination without a point of reference or at least a warrant in the in the source material, perhaps a partial reconciliation is available on the basis of the verbs, enrich vs. improve.  For me, improve connotes making up for a text’s supposed insufficiencies via translation, putting the original in the inferior position of a text needing correction from the translator’s hand, whereas enrich implies a kind of discovery, accentuating a tendency already present in the original, making the source text more decidedly itself via the act of translation.  In fact, this second verb seems to fit squarely in the sturdiest framework of our feminist theoreticians who, collapsing the binary relation of text/translation, refusing to prioritize one over the other, and exposing the myth of an immobile, definitive source, approach translation as the next in a series of successive gestures, an invitation to reread and to rewrite.

 

Reflecting on the poem Julia wrote following the fires which threatened outer Los Angeles, Boris voiced his admiration for her ability to locate the emotional unrest of the moment in the field of her poetic imagination and concluded that his translating it was “the least I could do.”  Here in contrast to the translation theory advanced in Bassnett and Godayol, Boris—a male translator—places his work in a secondary role with respect to Julia’s verse.  Rabassa, for his part, likens his contribution to that of the armor bearer, a humble Sancho Panza following (but also grounding) the inventions of Don Quixote.  Quick as I am to defend the translator as a writer and to champion the indispensable creativity of his work, I’d also suggest that the translator’s art is structurally a derivative one, and not merely because our go-to analogies have inscribed it as such.  It is the writer and not the translator who unites the disparate threads of discourse as they haven’t been synthesized before, the writer who, in Nietzschean terms, stares into the abyss.  The translator, whose challenges and dangers are manifold, never faces the terror of the blank page.  The constraint of the word already written yes but the monumental undertaking of making something where there was nothing—or merely the inchoate suggestion of something—no.

 

At least twice, Boris said he translates by intuition, evaluating critically only after the fact.  To Godayol’s search for new metaphors, we could thus add the Boris bell, a ding which registers in the translator’s aesthetic consciousness after he, semi-unconsciously, has got it right.  I too prefer to work intuitively, perhaps to my ruin.  That is, if my translator’s apparatus tinkles deliciously one evening, I proceed with caution the following morning, the sound indicating that I quite probably got it wrong.  Rabassa too speaks of working by instinct, trusting his hunches, and I’d like to suppose the more I practice this art, the better tuned and the more reliable my Bois bell will be.

 

Translation seems not only infinite but infinitely complex.  I’m thus grateful for any analogy which discloses a new facet of the inexhaustible polygon that is translation.  A relation of love and intimacy, a mediation across arbitrary borders, a cloud reflected on a placid surface such that water and sky are symmetrical—all are revelatory.  A collector of analogies, I’m thus leery of any systematic effort to legitimize or to prescribe one over another, as Godayol, at least implicitly, seems to do.  It seems hasty and ill-advised to summarize two centuries of translation history in a scant twenty pages and to opine categorically on the basis of a paucity of examples which distort rather than manifest the complexity of the issue.  Where Bassnett, nuanced in her claims and detailed in her examples, makes an illuminating argument and delimits a defensible terrain, Godayol slips into predictable, empty tropes which detract from her marvelous rereading of Athena/Medusa and succumb to the ease of propounding a model no less hierarchical—and no nearer the ontological complexity of translation—than that which she attempts to overturn.

 

-Josh