The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

246 The Translator’s Invisibility
translating process, of the relationship between the translation and
the foreign text, the translator and the foreign author. This is clear in
the interview:
I don’t become the author when I’m translating his prose or
poetry, but I’m certainly getting my talents into his hang-ups.
Another person’s preoccupations are occupying me. They
literally own me for that time. You see, it’s not just a matter
of reading the language and understanding it and putting it
into English. It’s understanding something that makes the
man do it, where he’s going. And it’s not an entirely objective
process. It must be partially subjective; there has to be some
kind of projection. How do you know which word to choose
when a word may have four or five possible meanings in
English? It’s not just understanding the text. In a way you live
it each time, I mean, you’re there. Otherwise, you’re not
holding the poem.
(ibid.:13)
English translation theorists from the seventeenth century onward
had recommended a sympathetic identification between the
translator and the foreign author. In Alexander Tytler’s words, “he
must adopt the very soul of his author, which must speak through
his own organs” (Tytler 1978:212). Yet this sort of sympathy was
used to underwrite the individualism of transparent translation, the
illusion of authorial presence produced by fluent discourse: it was
Tytler’s answer to the question, “How then shall a translator
accomplish this difficult union of ease with fidelity?” Blackburn’s
modernist sense of identification acknowledged that there could
never be a perfect sympathy, that the translator developed a
“projection,” a representation, specific to the target-language
culture, that interrogated the foreign author, exposing “his hangups.”
When Blackburn’s translator is “there,” the sense of
immediacy comes, not from any direct apprehension of the foreign
text, but from living out an interpretation that enables the translator
to “hold the poem,” rationalize every step in the translation process,
every choice of a word.
In responding to a 1970 questionnaire from the New York Quarterly,
Blackburn used similar psychological terms to describe the textual
effects of translation, observing that the translator’s identification
changes the foreign author, but also the translator himself, who