venuti

Call to action 309aims to question and possibly re-form, or simply smash the idea of,domestic canons.Blanchot is theorizing an approach to translation based onresistance, and as his examples and the occasion of his essay makeplain (it is a commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of theTranslator”), this is an approach that is specific to the Germancultural tradition. The theory and practice of English-languagetranslation, in contrast, has been dominated by submission, byfluent domestication, at least since Dryden. Various alternativeapproaches have indeed existed, including Dr. John Nott’shistoricist opposition to bowdlerizing, Francis Newman’s populistarchaism, and the polylingual experiments of Ezra Pound, Celiaand Louis Zukofsky, and Paul Blackburn. Judging from theirreception, however, these alternatives fell victim to their ownforeignizing tendencies: their strangeness provoked harsh criticismfrom reviewers, and they went unread or even—in Blackburn’scase—unpublished, relegated to the margins of British andAmerican culture, neglected by subsequent translators, translationtheorists, and literary scholars. For the most part, English-languagetranslators have let their choice of foreign texts and theirdevelopment of translation strategies conform to dominantcultural values in English, and among these values transparentdiscourse has prevailed, even if in varying forms.Yet alternative theories and practices of translation are worthrecovering because they offer contemporary English-languagetranslators exemplary modes of cultural resistance, however qualifiedthey must be to serve a new and highly unfavorable scene. Thedomesticating translation that currently dominates Anglo-Americanliterary culture, both elite and popular, can be challenged only bydeveloping a practice that is not just more self-conscious, but more selfcritical.Knowledge of the source-language culture, however expert, isinsufficient to produce a translation that is both readable and resistantto a reductive domestication; translators must also possess acommanding knowledge of the diverse cultural discourses in the targetlanguage, past and present. And they must be able to write them. Theselection of a foreign text for translation and the invention of adiscursive strategy to translate it should be grounded on a criticalassessment of the target-language culture, its hierarchies andexclusions, its relations to cultural others worldwide. Before a foreigntext is chosen, translators must scrutinize the current situation—thecanon of foreign literatures in English, as well as the canon of British