venuti

306 The Translator’s Invisibilityand Hebrew culture and by exploiting to an extreme its capacity forcompound words and syntactical fragmentation (see, for example,Felstiner 1983 and 1984). If the resistant strategy effectively producesan estranging translation, then the foreign text also enjoys amomentary liberation from the target-language culture, perhaps beforeit is reterritorialized with the reader’s articulation of a voice—recognizable, transparent—or of some reading amenable to thedominant aesthetic in English. The liberating moment would occurwhen the reader of the resistant translation experiences, in the targetlanguage, the cultural differences which separate that language andthe foreign text.Translation is a process that involves looking for similaritiesbetween languages and cultures—particularly similar messages andformal techniques—but it does this only because it is constantlyconfronting dissimilarities. It can never and should never aim toremove these dissimilarities entirely. A translated text should be thesite where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse ofa cultural other, and resistancy, a translation strategy based on anaesthetic of discontinuity, can best preserve that difference, thatotherness, by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in thetranslation process and the unbridgeable gaps between cultures. Incontrast, the notion of simpatico, by placing a premium on transparencyand demanding a fluent strategy, can be viewed as a culturalnarcissism: it seeks an identity, a self-recognition, and finds only thesame culture in foreign writing, only the same self in the cultural other.For the translator becomes aware of his intimate sympathy with theforeign writer only when he recognizes his own voice in the foreigntext. Unfortunately, the irreducible cultural differences mean that thisis always a mis-recognition as well, yet fluency ensures that this pointgets lost in the translating. Now more than ever, when transparencycontinues to dominate Anglo-American culture, ensuring that simpaticowill remain a compelling goal for English-language translators, itseems important to reconsider what we do when we translate.