Volume 19, 2007 - Brown University

134 Morgan Palmer
the translator’s part—‘defecates to a pure transparency,’ and disappears.
(Arnold, 1883: 150)
Arnold highlights the problem of distance between the translator and the text.
The mist represents the translator’s own cultural background, which can blind
him and prevent him from translating accurately. Thus Arnold sets up a contrast
between murky blindness and transparency. Chapman and other translators are
unsuccessful because they are blind to the influences of their own cultures upon
their work. Arnold believes that in order to write a good translation, a scholar
must simultaneously separate himself from the text and draw closer to it. Specifically,
he must put aside his own personal reactions to the text and must examine
closely the authority of the text itself.
In addition, Arnold believes that the translator must make every effort to
remain true to the original work. Arnold comments that some translations have
very strong qualities,
but even in these points they have none of them precisely the same kind of
merit as Homer, and therefore the new translator, even if he can imitate them
in their good points, will still not satisfy his judge, the scholar, who asks him
for Homer and Homer’s kind of merit, or, at least, for as much of them as it is
possible to give. (Arnold, 1883: 201)
Arnold suggests that the translator’s task is to create an English version of
Homer that has as much merit as the original Greet text. He asserts that no translation
has achieved that lofty goal, and therefore translators must find new ways
to experiment with English renderings of the text (Arnold, 1883: 201). These
experimentations should work towards recapturing the original feel of the text,
and should not be based on the work of other translators. Since Arnold believes
that there is no translation of Homer that is completely successful, he grants
authority to the original text. Any attempts to re-constellate Homer in the
English language will fail because the translators are not Homeric poets.
Therefore, they cannot possibly reduplicate the brilliance of the original, but
must strive to render it as successfully as possible.
Spivak also believes that the text should be the ultimate authority and
rejects Mahasweta Devi’s own interpretation of “Stanadayini.” In a section
entitled “The Author’s Own Reading: A Subject Position” she explains why she
wants to deconstruct and re-constellate the author’s own views.
The traffic between the historian and the writer that I have been proposing
could not be justified if one devoted oneself to this reading. In order that
Mahasweta’s parable be disclosed, what must be excluded from the story is
precisely the attempt to represent the subaltern as such. I will therefore take
the risk of putting to one side that all too neat reading, and unravel the texts
to pick up the threads of the excluded attempt. (Spivak, 1988: 244-245)