Contemporary discussions about translation are beset by questions about agency and power. Who should be translated? Who will choose who is translated? Who has the right to translate? What mode of translation has the translator chosen? How much were they paid? Were they named on the cover of the book? Who is really in charge of the translation? Is it the original author or the translator? Can we trust the translation?
And of course, there’s the old standy-by: Is the translation faithful to the original? This question – which remains at least in the background of so many translations discussions — has tended to result in a paradox: When the translator is least faithful, they are the most “free.” When they are too faithful, they are “mere mimics” who follow the foreign texts too closely, losing their sovereignty, personhood. The translator is trapped in this conundrum: to be free and wrong, or right and confined.
I wrote about this conundrum and my interest in mimicry a few months ago for the Poetry Foundation.[1] Another person who’s grappling with the conundrum is Damion Searls. In his astute new book, The Philosophy of Translation, Searls intervenes in these agency discussions by offering a new framework for reading works in translation, directly rethinking many of the old truisms of translation discourse.
Many recent translation discussions – picking up on a key term from Lawrence Venuti’s theoretical work, though not always maintaining the political implications — have focused on making the translator “visible.” This model of the translator tends to foreground the “choices” that the translator makes, creating a sense of the translator as “decider in chief,” someone who – due to their mastery of language and literary interpretation – makes the “right” choices. In a sense the translator is rewritten as a kind of author. Searls correctly observes that both the traditional model of the translator as subservient to the original, and the new model of translator as author-like, fail to pick up on what makes translation happen – and what makes it exciting. To get at the intersecting energies of “original” and “translation.” Searls argues that the translator “takes up” the original. The translator is involved with a highly collaborative, dynamic relationship with the text and its author(s): the translator translates under the influence of the foreign text, but the translator is not without agency since they choose to “take up” the translation.
This argument leads to perhaps the most exciting idea in Searls’ book: His model of translation as “affordance.” This model, which Searls picks up from the scholar James J. Gibson, suggests that the original has its own power: the affordance is the parameters the original texts sets up for the translator. It “guides” the translator’s decisions. It’s not just a matter of the translsator making choices. The text plays a part in the equation. Searls quotes Gibson’s explanation of the term:
“The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.”
While the translator “takes on” the foreign texts, that text exerts influence over the translator and the translation process. Hence, the translator is never “free” (why would they want to be?), always working within a dynamic set up by the original. I love this idea of the translation as an environment, in which translator and original (and original author) move around and interact.
How does the translator work within the affordance? Although he mentions this in passing, Searls makes a key point by suggesting that translation may be less about making conscious “choices,” and more about “intuition.” That is to say, the volatile body is at play. Searls thus moves away from the neutral, objective and masterful translator-as-decider, toward a bodily translator who is translating under the influence of the original.
And what, Searls asks, is ultimately the “original” that we try to rewrite or “match” (or as I would put it, “mimic”) with our translations? It is not some kind of well wrought urn existing outside of time, but the translator’s “experience” of the text. This is a crucial point. Discussions of translation tend to fall back on an “original” – as if there were a stable original we can find an equivalent of if we are properly educated and neutral. But of course, there is no neutral translator, no stable “original text,” but constantly shifting experiences of the text:
“Here we have, perhaps unexpectedly, the most far-reaching consequence of understanding translation as a kind of reading: no one translates a text – they translate their reading of the text, and everyone has different reading experiences …”
Ultimately, the translator is trying to reproduce their experience of the text in a new language.
Along with the agency discussions I mentioned at the beginning of this review, a lot of recent discussions about translation focus on the binary: Is the translation a poor imitation of the original or is it a “new” text? This binary echoes agency binary: Either the translator is a mere mimic or they are themselves a kind of author of a “new” book, its troublesome strings to the original finally cut, allowing them liberation and freedom. Searls’ book complicates these questions and moves us toward a strangely more practical model (strange for a book with the word “philosophy” in its title): The strings that tie us to the original are not a hindrance but a guide, not a trap but an inspiration.
When I give talks about translation, I’m often asked what kind of method translators should use and what method should be used to evaluate their translations. These are questions I have trouble answering because I don’t tend to make conscious choices on how to translate. I translate according to how I feel the text tells me to translate. And it is out of that process that I have developed ideas about how and why I am translating. Searls offers a very astute take on this conundrum in the book:
“My experience at least, of reading like a translator and translating, is of opening up my attention to as much as I possibly can, both of what I am reading and of my own responses to it, and anticipating as much as I can how the English-language reader might react to anything and everything in what I produce.”
To be a translator is both something more complex and something simpler than how it is generally described: The translator is someone who has to remain open to as much as possible in their reading of a foreign text. The translator does not “capture the spirit” of the foreign text, as translators are so often told, but is affected by the foreign text. Searls’ best advice is to remain open to the experience of reading the text, not to capture it.
Focusing attention on individual interpretations of a text leads Searls to question the commonly assumed model of translation as an exchange between static, homogenous, monolingual cultures. Searls argues:
“Rather than beginning from an assumption of two separate contexts, we should view the translator as someone in a diverse community who reads the text in one language and produces a text in a different language. Following Feeney, I call this ‘realignment’ within a single existing context.” (He is referring here to Denis Feeney’s Beyond Greek.)
As Rita Felski has argued in “Context Stinks,”[2] there’s nothing inherently wrong about “context,” but the word “context” seems to lend itself to the practice of simplifying and petrifying the world in which a book is written. But the idea of separate and homogenous “contexts” is a monolingual fantasy: cultures are heterogenous and shifting, constantly transforming. The “original context” is already something that vibrates in and between cultures, languages.
This “vibration” makes it hard to judge the book in the current binary of “domesticating” versus “foreignizing” translation. Searls jettisons this reductive binary, instead portraying translations as a kind of “realignment” of text, translator and “contexts.” In some sense this “realignment” – akin to what Joyelle McSweewey and I have called the “deformation zone” — makes us aware of how volatile and multiple the “original” was to begin with. The “original” was already written under the influence of other texts; the translation puts us in contact with other cultures and literatures, perhaps within the same nation; every translator translates their reading of the text, not an objective, stable, well wrought text.
The act of translation is volatile. Critics may standardize it, try to contain it, but – as Searls notes in his discussion about my critical writing – “Göransson … welcomes such destabilizing forces,” The problem with translation is not that it cannot be done. As Searls succinctly puts it: “The annoying claim that translation is impossible actually rests on the obvious fact that translation is possible and happens all the time.” The problem is that translation troubles traditional models of authorship and originality: It generates too many authors, of too many texts, from too many places. Searls is one step on the way toward a reconception of translation – and therefore literature – in a way that includes, embraces this excess.
[Published by Yale University Press on October 29, 2024, 248 pages, $28.00 hardcover]
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1601010/in-defense-of-mimicry
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/41328987
To read five poems by Ann Jäderlund, translated from the Swedish by Johannes Göransson, click here.