On Impostures

 

I realized after reading the imposter that this week’s readings are my very first exposure to Arabic literature. After reading Michael Cooperson’s imposter, I am left with an overflowing sense of respect for him as a translator. As told in the introduction, notes on translation, and the long lists of a glossary, we know that Arabic is an extremely dense language. When I learned some Arabic from my suitemate when I lived in global house sophomore year who happened to have been the Arabic cluster leader, I was amazed at the complexity of the language and felt a vague sense of resemblance shared between Arabic and Chinese–that texts written in these languages are so dense that it’s almost impossible to explicate in English, preserving the original literal beauty of the source language. 

In my own translation, I am often faced with that stylish vs. faithful translation conundrum. And as professor and some of my peers know, I am obsessed with rhymes and I love poetry more than prose. Nascent a translator I am, this conundrum was solved skillfully by Professor Cooperson in his translation of the imposter. Just like Kroll has argued in the essay, translation needs to be fluid and adapt to the original text’s objective and need. When the imposter being such an enchanting work that largely attributes to its wordplay, a successful translation of such work needs to preserve the wordplay in its original.

I truly enjoyed reading Cooperson’s translation and also have a great impression of Arabic literature now, and I can’t wait to ask some of the rhyme questions I have to our Arabic representative in class. 

 

Jiayi 

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 

3/14 Reflections

 Paul Kroll's paper on the sinologist as translator hits upon what I find to be the fundamental problem in translating poetry, that being whether to translate for the purpose of "imparting information or in the hope of giving pleasure". To me, the most interesting feature of this paper was the discussion of a need for balance, between creating a literal translation or one that strays too far from the original. Particularly I enjoyed the passage in which Kroll critiques those who have their own strong tenents on translation, that within a large enough body of their work they are more likely than not to have broken their own rules, something that I am also forced to admit I do, despite my own thoughts on what constitutes a proper translation. It was also nice to read someone who so openly points out that much of translation criticism is done with an air of superiority, blankly pointing out flaws with no intent to do anything other than that. 

Impostures I found was interesting, that is really the only word I feel like I can use with any degree of sincerity. It was difficult to read, and I often wish I had a glossary until I got to the end and found out there was in fact a glossary, except the glossary was about the length of the entire passage. I'd be very interested in hearing about what sort of mindset you'd have to be in to be able to translate something like this, and resist the urge to just explain, like in the piece by Murakami we were supposed to retranslate; the striped shirt being explained in the English translation as being the Hanshin Tigers shirt. The way the accent is in the English also makes for some reason think of Westerns and cowboys.

Steven

Reflections 3/14

 "A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully" 

I found Cooperson's introduction to be more interesting than his translation itself. He revealed many crucial details about the original text and its background, and they made the work memorable to me without even reading it - I wish the introduction was made into a separate book itself, I would have loved reading it. His introductions to each of the Impostures felt engaging, too. I think Cooperson is skilled at introducing and describing and perhaps assumed that understanding a work descriptively would be sufficient for re-creating it in translation, hence he gets an idea of transferring Arabic dialects into English ones because in theory the concepts seem similar. In practice, however, I do not think those can be equalized at all, and that is proven by the fact that the translation feels difficult and confusing to read - the complete opposite of how the original is supposed to be. It felt like the idea was cumbersome and loaded to the point that it obscured the light of the original - and well, that makes complete sense because it seems that Cooperson attempted to sort of create a "new" light to begin with. He invested a lot of effort into his endeavor - effort that I believe was unnecessary and was more akin to trying to fit a square into a triangular opening. I think both the creation of a work and its translation are to be done with ease, catching and following the flow, feeling the poem rather than swimming against it - like how the article on sinology mentioned, one needs to feel the taste of poetry to translate it, to know how to feel the taste of the work to translate it in a way that does not come off as bland. Sure, Cooperson's work is not bland on the surface. At the same time it still left a bland aftertaste and felt more like a script rather than poetry. It also did showcase his erudition to a high degree, like another article pointed out. But in this case equalizing Cooperson's erudition with that of Al-Hariri would be the same as equalizing English dialects with Arabic ones. Moreover, the point of translation was in conveying Al-Hariri, not showing off Cooperson... And now only those possessing a similar level of erudition as Cooperson could have a chance to enjoy his works.. It gets way too confusing following all the contradictions that arise! 

I read those three Impostures in Russian - which were called Maqamat like the original work - and it felt a pleasure to follow the rhyming within sentences that appeared rhythmically and without fail. My mind felt at ease and I had fun reading. Maqamat had a childhood feeling to it and were like playing with toys - the meaning is precisely to not have an explicit, practical purpose to such activity as reading and writing rhyming prose. Through this translation, I could see why Al-Hariri became famous and his works got copied a lot right away, I also could imagine how they looked like in the original. I even felt like I could almost hear them recited in Arabic even though I do not speak the language. Russian does not have distinct dialects so everything was written in a uniform style - yet it left space to imagine variations in the original, and served as a window into it rather than its replacement.

--

I think the "translatability" of Al-Hariri comes down to how important it is to translate him - is he important enough to twist and bend the English language a little (or not little) to relay his style? Is he and other authors important enough for readers to willingly grow accustomed to literary inventions and welcoming them? It seems that the English language is not flexible when it comes to syntactical innovations. Should it remain this way? Why or why not? 

-Ksenia

Ronkainen, Jonika 3/14 Comments

 Cooperson’s Intro:

    I loved the way Cooperson framed the author’s play with language as tooling with a linguistic memory of the eternal – it feels like the call for the reader to learn how to read what is inarticulable in direct terms, and I really like that as a starting point for reading this kind of translation – that is, to read the memory of the original in the work – I really like the idea that the memory of the original might register itself negatively (in the sense of absence) in a translated text. I’d really like to think more about his description of language as “powerfully in excess of material reality” as I’m not quite sure which way he means it: if it is to gesture at an excess of material reality within material reality, or if it posits an immateriality of language, or whatever else if I’ve misfired in both of these interpretations. And further, his description of this overwhelming the "agreed-upon relationship of word and object" – by which I would assume he means a sign–referent relationship, making signification the excess of language over material reality, which I don’t know that I agree with (or disagree with, to be clear). 

(Also, Cooperson pulled together a great assemblage of language-games quotes, big fan of that)

Impostures: 

    I think I almost liked Cooperson’s introduction so much that the actual work was bound to let me down, and it definitely did on my first read through. It was almost like because Cooperson had such a good theory of how to do the translation, the translation couldn’t rise to the level of the theory because it would be a perfect translation, but only for an audience of one (or the set of people who would be reading in this in English, with the same knowledge of esoteric Arabic biblical referents – which I’m thinking is a pretty small group) because it didn’t sacrifice very much. While reading the first imposture, I wrote up a whole memorandum on how great it would be to have annotations or a side-by-side literal translation, googling “boghaleen” and “kippen” and some other words not to even get a glimpse of what the word meant within a full page of search results, only to find the glossary on the backend :) So I went for a second readthrough and now I think it’s great because it makes the sacrifice of convenient reading, meaning it’s not going to offer something for everyone (because not everyone is going to be keen to take up the inconvenience), but it can be everything for anyone (whomever is enticed to take up the inconvenience). 

Preposterous? (Cooperson)

In Michael Cooperson’s introduction to Impostures, he makes several strong points about untranslatability; about non-standard English; and about the futility of translation rules and binaries. First, he very eloquently demonstrates how untranslatability is a modern and European idea—“the product of early-modern European notions about the spirit of peoples being embodied in their languages” (xxxvi)—an idea that arguably has no place dictating whether or not an Arabic manuscript from 1111 gets translated. He also justifies his inclusion of non-standard English dialects eloquently, acknowledging openly his thought processes about how to respectfully include them as part of his translation and why. He ultimately explains: “But I also take seriously the arguments of linguists and writers, many of them members of the same communities, who point out that ethno-specific forms of speech are fully developed forms of language and therefore no less deserving of serious study than, say, classical Arabic or Standard English” (xlix). Given Arabic’s general (mal)treatment of non-standard language and dialects, I think Cooperson’s position is particularly noteworthy: all forms of language, standard or otherwise, are valid, important, and useful. Finally, I also liked how Cooperson admitted to changing his mind about Kroll’s essay at the end of his translator’s note. Cooperson writes: “Before I met al-Hariri, I would have agreed with everything Kroll is saying here. Having now learned something about the Impostures and its reception in various languages, I cannot imagine carrying it over honestly without self-display” (1). As many of us grapple with questions about how much our own voices should appear in our respective translation projects, I found this part particularly relevant. This is not a one-time decision but rather a choice that translators make repeatedly, depending on the text, the passage, and the author.

I found Cooperson’s introduction far stronger than the selected impostures themselves. Cooperson writes openly that not everyone will enjoy every imposture, and perhaps I did not enjoy these three because I am not very familiar with twentieth-century Irish/Hiberno-English nor Jonathan Swift nor James Joyce. Moreover, the glossaries and notes at the end of each imposture demanded that the reader essentially go back and re-translate the entire section themselves if they really wanted to understand what Cooperson was doing. For a text that was supposed to be about word play, that simply did not feel much like “play.” That being said, I found, for example, imposture 27, "The Wild East,” which is written in the language of the American West, more accessible and engaging. I wonder if impostures 22 and 32—“Leveraging the Flow” and “Jury-Rigged”—which are written in “management speak” and “legalese” respectively might also be easier for a general American readership to access. Although Cooperson discusses the issues that arise when referencing the styles of more recent writers, I wonder if that would have made the impostures more accessible to a modern readership. 

-sharon

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