THE SCANDALS OF TRANSLATION

INTRODUCTIONthe relationship between the translation and the foreign text as if his access tothe latter were direct and unmediated. With Kafka, he criticizes the French useof “marcher” (“walk”) to translate “gehen” (“go, walk”) because the resultingeffect “is surely not what Kafka wanted here” (Kundera 1995:105). But atranslation can’t give what a foreign writer would want if he were alive andwriting in the translating language and culture. What Kafka would write inFrench can be no more than another French interpretation, not a renderingmore faithful or adequate to the German text. The fact that the author is theinterpreter doesn’t make the interpretation unmediated by target-languagevalues.Kundera doesn’t want to recognize the linguistic and cultural differencesthat a translation must negotiate; he rather wants to preside over them byselecting the ones he most prefers. Thus, he produced a third English versionof his novel The Joke, which he cobbled together not just from his ownEnglish and French renderings, but also from the “many fine solutions” andthe “great many faithful renderings and good formulations” in the previoustranslations (Kundera 1992: x). Whether the translators consented to Kundera’shandling of their work remains unclear; the title page of his revision does notlist their names.Copyright law permits Kundera to get away with his questionable uses oftranslation by giving him an exclusive right in works derived from his. Thelaw underwrites his view that the author should be the sole arbiter of allinterpretations of his writing. And that turns out to mean that he can bearbitrary as well. Kundera’s “definitive” English version of The Joke actuallyrevises the 1967 Czech text: it omits more than fifty passages, making thenovel more intelligible to the Anglo-American reader, removing references toCzech history but also altering characters (Stanger 1997). Kundera’s prefacepassed silently over these revisions. In fact, he concluded his version with themisleading notation, “completed December 5, 1965,” as if he had merelytranslated the unabridged original text. When the author is the translator,apparently, he is not above the domestications that he attacked in the previousEnglish versions.Translation clearly raises ethical questions that have yet to be sorted out. Themere identification of a translation scandal is an act of judgment: here itpresupposes an ethics that recognizes and seeks to remedy the asymmetries intranslating, a theory of good and bad methods for practicing and studyingtranslation. And the ethics at issue must be theorized as contingent, an idealgrounded in the specific cultural situations in which foreign texts are chosenand translated or in which translations and the act of translating are made theobjects of research. I articulate these ethical responsibilities first in terms of myown work, beginning with a discussion of the choices I confront as anAmerican translator of literary texts. The issue of a translation ethics is addressedsubsequently in other pertinent contexts, particularly when the power oftranslation to form identities and qualify agents is examined. The ethical stance I6