THE SCANDALS OF TRANSLATION

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INTRODUCTIONThe memory of these events lives on in the thousands of inscriptionsand the legends of oral tradition.As Mason observed, we do not need to attribute a deliberate intention tothe translator in order to pe.rceive the skewed representation in thetranslation (Mason 1994:33). The ideological slanting against theindigenous population is inscribed in specific discursive choices whichwork both to create a subordinate identity and to make it seem natural orobvious—as it must have seemed to the translator and the magazineeditors. Or perhaps they were guided by a translation strategy that prizesthe utmost clarity, easy readability, so that the most familiar languageturned out to be the most prejudicial, but unconsciously so. What doesseem obvious is that the thinking about translation at UNESCO—aninstitution that is utterly dependent on translating and interpreting for itsoperation—is not incisive enough to vet a translated text that compromisesits basic principles and goals.Despite the magnitude of this particular example, the exposures thattranslation enables here will seek to avoid the sensationalism inherent in anysimple muckraking. I want instead to initiate a productive rethinking of thequestioned values and institutions, although through their anxious relationshipswith translation. I want to explore the ways in which translation redefinesauthorship in literature and in law, creates identities receptive to culturaldifference, requires different approaches to teaching literature and to doingphilosophy, and recommends new policies for publishers and corporations. Inthe process translation will be conceived anew on the basis of detailed casestudies, resulting in a set of theoretical concepts that carry practicalconsequences.Specific cases, past and present, are invaluable for the light they shed not onlyon the current marginality of translation, but on the meanings and functions itcan support if greater attention were paid to its diverse motives and effects.Translations are produced for many reasons, literary and commercial, pedagogicaland technical, propagandistic and diplomatic. Yet no translator or institutionalinitiator of a translation can hope to control or even be aware of everycondition of its production. And no agent of a translation can hope to anticipateits every consequence, the uses to which it is put, the interests served, the valuesit comes to convey. Nonetheless, it is these conditions and consequences thatoffer the most compelling reasons for discriminating among the stakes involvedin translating and reading translations.My chapters present a series of cultural studies that aim to advance currentthinking about translation. They move between several different languages,cultures, periods, disciplines, and institutions in an effort to describe and evaluatethe social effects of translated texts, to expand the possibilities for translationprojects, to establish translation more firmly as an area of research in the academy,and to win for translators greater cultural authority and a more favorable legal3
INTRODUCTIONstatus, especially (although not exclusively) in the United States and the UnitedKingdom.The authority I wish to achieve for translators and translations isn’t amere aggrandizement. It doesn’t trade on the cultural prestige nowenjoyed by original authors and compositions—novelists, say, or poets—or on the official nature of the institutions in which their prestige ismaintained. On the contrary, because translating is intercultural, itinvolves a distinct kind of authorship, secondary to the foreign text andin the service of different communities, foreign as well as domestic. Theonly authority that translation can expect depends on its remainingderivative, distinguishable from the original compositions that it tries tocommunicate, and collective, remaining open to the other agents whoinfluence it, especially domestic readerships. Hence, the only prestige thata translator can gain comes from practicing translation, not as a form ofpersonal expression, but as a collaboration between divergent groups,motivated by an acknowledgement of the linguistic and culturaldifferences that translation necessarily rewrites and reorders. Translating,like any writing, is usually practiced in solitary conditions. But it linksmultitudes, often in the most unexpected groupings.The focus on the marginality of translation is strategic. It assumes that astudy of the periphery in any culture can illuminate and ultimately revisethe center. Yet in the case of translation, of cross-cultural exchange, theperipheries are multiple, domestic and foreign at once. They take the formof marginal cultures, so defined by their position in national or globalframeworks, situated in relation to hegemonic languages, a standard dialectat home and English generally, still the most translated languageworldwide. The overriding assumption of this book is perhaps the greatestscandal of translation: asymmetries, inequities, relations of domination anddependence exist in every act of translating, of putting the translated inthe service of the translating culture. Translators are complicit in theinstitutional exploitation of foreign texts and cultures. But there have alsobeen translators who acted just as dubiously on their own, not in theemploy of any bureaucracy.Between 1967 and 1972, the American translator Norman Thomas diGiovanni worked closely with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges,publishing several English-language volumes of Borges’s fiction and poetry,acting as his literary agent, helping him gain the canonical status he enjoystoday (Rostagno 1997:117–120). Yet di Giovanni’s editing and translatingaggressively revised the Spanish texts to increase their accessibility to anAmerican readership: he assimilated them to American stylistic canons,adhering to current standard usage, smoothing out the abrupt transitions inBorges’s prose, avoiding abstractions in favor of concrete diction, evencorrecting quotations that the writer made from memory (Howard 1997).Of his work with Borges, di Giovanni said: “I liken it to cleaning a4
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THE SCANDALS OF TRANSLATION

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