Translation and Culture

BUCKNELL REVIEW
Translation and Culture
Edited by
KATHERINE M. FAULL
Translation
and Culture:
Edited by
KATHERINE M. FAULL
How we view the foreign, presented

either in the interrelated forms of culture,
language, or text, determines to a large
degree the way in which we translate. This
volume of essays examines the cultural
politics of translation that have determined
the production and dissemination of “the
foreign” in domestic cultures as varied as
contemporary North America, Europe, and
Israel. The essays address from a variety of
theoretical perspectives the question posed
almost two hundred years ago
by the German philosopher Friedrich
Schleiermacher of whether the translator
should foreignize the domestic or
domesticate the foreign. Through the
examination of the dialectic of cultural and
linguistic change that is occasioned by
translation, the authors ask how culture has
influenced the politics and practice of
translation in the past and how that
relationship could change in the future.
Given the transformational potential of
translation, what is its role in the twenty-
first century? What ethical considerations
should now accompany the politics of
translation?
Central to the questions that surround the
interaction of translation and culture is the
notion of the “foreign” and its interpretation
and treatment at the hands of centuries of
translators. Using the theoretical work of
Schleiermacher as a starting point, the
volume introduces the problem of the
“foreign” and points to the need for what
Derrida has called “an ethics of the word”
in the process of translation.
(Con i Con back flap)

BUCKNELL REVIEW

STATEMENT OF POLICY
BUCKNELL REVIEW is a scholarly interdisciplinaryjournal. Each

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BUCKNELL REVIEW
A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts, and Sciences
Editor
GREG CLINGEIAM
Associate Editor
DOROTHY L. BAUMWOLL
Assistant Editor
ANDREW P. CIOTOLA
Contributors should send manuscripts with a self-addressed

stamped envelope to the Editor, Bucknell Review, Bucknell University,
Lewisburg, PA 17837.
BUCKNELL REVIEW
Edited by
KATHERINE M. FAULL
Lewisburg
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Contents
Notes on Contributors 9
Introduction Katherine M. Faull 13
Retranslations: The Creation of

Value Lawrence Venuti 25
The Wilderness and Its Voices:

Translating Schneider’s Novel
Schlafes Bruder Osman Durrani 39
Translating Myth: The Task of

Speaking Time and Space Jill Scott 58
Intracultural Translations: Validating

Regional Identities in Nineteenth-
Century German Realism Arne Koch 73
Sacrificing Sense to Sound: Mimetic

Translation and Feminist Writing Luise von Flotow 91
Names in Annie Proulx’s Accordion

Crimes and Close Range: Wyoming
Stones and Their Hebrew
Translation Sara Friedman 107
“The Task of the Translator” in

Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred
Years of Solitude and Brossard’s
Mauve Desert Monika Giacoppe 124
The Death of the Authors a.k.a.

Twilight of the Translators Christi Ann Merrill 139
Contemporary French Poetry and

Translation Maryann De Julio 151
“Happy Babel?” Translation in

Europe Ina Pfitzner 160
5
Recent Issues of BUCKNELL REVIEW
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Turning the Century: Feminist Theory in the 1990s
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Irishness and (Post)Modernism
Anthropology and the German Enlightenment:
Perspectives on Humanity
Having Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition in
Twentieth-Century America
Self-Conscious Art: A Tribute to John W. Kronik
Sound and Light: La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela
Perspectives on Contemporary Spanish American Theatre
Reviewing Orpheus: Essays on the Cinema and Art of Jean Cocteau
Questioning History: The Postmodern Turn to the Eighteenth Century
Making History: Textuality and the Forms of Eighteenth-Century Culture
History and Memory: Suffering and Art
Rites of Passage in Ancient Greece: Literature, Religion, Society
Bakhtin and the Nation
New Essays in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism
Caribbean Cultural Identities
Lorca, Buhuel, Dali: Art and Theory
Untrodden Regions of the Mind: Romanticism and Psychoanalysis
Art and the Religious Impulse
Adrift in the Technological Matrix
Notes on Contributors
Maryann De Julio is a professor of French in the Department of

Modern and Classical Language Studies at Kent State University.
She has translated work by contemporary French and Italian writers,
including Yves Bonnefoy, Emmanuel Hocquard, Jeanne Hyvrard,
Monica Sarsini, and Margaret Mazzantini, as well as a play by the
eighteenth-century French activist Olympe de Gouges. Her transla¬
tion articles and reviews have appeared in Contemporary Literature,
Translation Review, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, and Sites.
Osman Durrani is a professor of German at the University of Kent.

He teaches courses on the Age of Goethe and contemporary and
comparative literature. Recent publications include a study of im¬
ages of Germany in the modern novel, “Fictions of Germany”
(1994), an edited volume on the “New Germany” (1995), and arti¬
cles on numerous postwar authors, including Siiskind, Westphalen,
Schwanitz, Delius, and Robert Schneider. He has also publshed ex¬
tensively on German rock music, popular song and cabaret. A vol¬
ume of essays on the German historical novel, edited jointly with Ju¬
lian Preece, appeared in 2001.
Katherine M. Faull is a professor of German and director of the

Program in Comparative Humanities at Bucknell University. She is
currently completing a translation of eighteenth-century manu¬
scripts from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for a project funded by the
National Endowment for the Humanities. She publishes widely in
the fields of history and philosophy of religion. She is the author
and translator of Moravian Women’s Memoirs (1997) and editor of An¬
thropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity
(BucknellReview, 38:2, 1995).
Luise von Flotow is an associate professor in Translation Studies

at the University of Ottawa with special interest in translation and
gender. She is author of Translation and Gender: Translating in the Era
9
10 TRANSLATION AND CULTURE
of Feminism, (1997). Present research is on public diplomacy and

translation, and she has also produced numerous literary transla¬
tions from French and German into English.
Sara Friedman is a literary translator (English/Hebrew) and is cur¬

rently preparing a doctoral dissertation on literary translation at the
University of Oxford.
Monika Giacoppe is an assistant professor of comparative/world lit¬

erature at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She is currently translating
an anthology of short fiction by the Swiss-French writer, S. Corinna
Bille, in collaboration with Christiane Makward of the Pennsylvania
State University.
Arne Koch is an assistant professor of German at the University of

Kansas. Research interests include nineteenth- and early-twentieth-
century German culture and film adaptation studies. He has written
articles ranging from the notion of loyalty in medieval German cul¬
ture, to sexuality in the works of Arthur Schnitzler and Frank Wede¬
kind, as well as on nineteenth-century German literature and the
creation of communal identities. Current projects include “Revolu¬
tion and Reaction: The Political Context of Central European Liter¬
ature” for the volume on nineteenth-century German literature in
the Camden House History of German Literature series and a book
tentatively entitled Between National Fantasies and Regional Reali¬
ties: The Paradox of Identity in Nineteenth-Century German Litera¬
ture.
Christi Ann Merrill is an assistant professor of South Asian litera¬

ture at the Liniversity of Michigan. She has recently translated the
stories of Vijay Dan Detha from Hindi and Rajasthani and is cur¬
rently writing a book that brings together theory and practice: Fig¬
ures of Translation: Postcolonial Riddles of Literary Identity and Dis¬
placed Humor.
Ina Pfitzner is a translator and interpreter for German, French,

and English and has contributed to translations for the European
Commission and the European Parliament. She has published trans¬
lations of poetry by Wolf Biermann and Boris Vian as well as prose
by Panai't Istrati in Chelsea, Metamorphoses, and Exquisite Corpse. She is
currently an independent scholar in her native Berlin, where she is
also coordinating the fringe program for the third international lit¬
erature festival Berlin.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 11
Jill Scott is an assistant professor of German at Queen’s Univer¬

sity, Kingston. She is currently working on a study on the interrela¬
tions of female dance performance and literature at the turn of the
century. She has published articles on Hofmannsthal, Musil, Benja¬
min, Novalis, and Wagner.
Lawrence Venuti is a professor of English at Temple University. A

translation theorist and historian as well as a translator, primarily of
Italian literature, his books include The Scandals of Translation:
Towards an Ethics of Difference (1998) and The Translation Studies
Reader (2000). Most recently he has translated Antonia Pozzi’s
Breath: Poems and Letters (2002).
Introduction
T HE history of translation is also the history of the foreign. That

which for centuries has been varyingly interpreted as “other”
to the domestic has been treated as a category either to be welcomed
or to be obliterated and subsumed under the domestic. From Cicero
to Diderot translation was seen as the way to enrich one’s own lan¬
guage and culture with little or no regard for fidelity to the original.
There were no ethics of translation, per se. The operative terms
used by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet in their introduction to
a collection of historical essays on translation are those of warfare.'
Works in a foreign tongue are to be “looted,” ideas are “expropri¬
ated,” the “act of translation [is] a rigorous exploitation of the origi¬
nal. It is only with the advent of the encyclopedistes that the foreign
begins to be considered as a culture of equals that demands respect
and as such adjustment and adaptation within the domestic lan¬
guage. Whereas in the past the best translation might have been that
which seamlessly glossed over cultural and linguistic difference,
today great intellectual hopes are attached to the introduction of
the foreign to domestic culture. In the industrialized world this can
be seen in the guise of multiculturalism and the celebration of eth¬
nic diversity, while in less industrialized and more traditional socie¬
ties the foreign (read “the West”) is welcomed under the rubric of
modernization, industrialization, and westernization.
So, what is the role of translation in this century? Is it what Jacques
Derrida has termed an “ethics of the word”?3 Given the dominance
of North American language and culture throughout much of the
world, what political and economic inequities can, for example, the
translation of minor culture into majority culture address? Central
to the discussion of these questions is the work of a group of scholars
from around the world, Lawrence Venuti, Anthony Pym, and An¬
toine Berman, who have over the last ten years produced a body of
theoretical work that has opened the field of translation studies up
to larger issues of cultural politics in a theoretically provocative man¬
ner. With this issue of Bucknell Review I would like to suggest that the
treatment of the foreign in the task of translation is inextricably
linked to an ethics of the word. And by way of introducing this nexus
13
of language, culture, and ethics, I turn to German philosopher and

theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher.
In his volume on the interconnections between German Romanti¬
cism and twentieth-century critical theory, Andrew Bowie summa¬
rizes Schleiermacher’s definition of the act of interpretation as fol¬
lows: “it does not derive final foundation from already existing
rules, but rather imposes a continuing obligation upon free actors
to attempt to see the world from the viewpoint of the other, and to
articulate the potential created by the other, including oneself as other
in a self-reflexive interpretation.”4 It is not without reason that I in¬
troduce this volume with reference to Friedrich Schleiermacher. For
both Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical theory (and this includes, I
will argue, his essay on translation) and his aesthetics have as their
linchpin his particular notion of ethics. And it is the ethics of transla¬
tion and the intertwining of culture, politics, and language that
form the common thread of the essays in this volume.
Schleiermacher’s essay “On the Different Methods of Transla¬
tion” was originally presented as a lecture to the Prussian Royal
Academy of Sciences in Berlin on 24 June 1813.5 Schleiermacher
wrote the essay in a matter of days while deeply occupied with the
development of his dialectics, ethics, and hermeneutics. The lecture
is also shaped by political and cultural resistance to Napoleonic
France. As Scharnhorst is revitalizing the Prussian army, Schleier¬
macher aims to shape German into a language of world culture and,
through its linguistic and semantic capacities, educate the bourgeoi¬
sie. To refer to Schleiermacher in the context of this volume will no
doubt invite criticism from that group of translation theorists al¬
ready mentioned. For Pym, Venuti, and Berman have all criticized
Schleiermacher for what they have perceived as his nationalistic and
bourgeois ends. Furthermore, Venuti and Berman have serious
methodological doubts about what they consider to be Schleier¬
macher’s textualization of reading subjects, arguing that his ethics
of translation do not actually aid in the creation of a political space
for cross-cultural communication. However, I would argue that of
greater importance to subsequent theorists of translation and cul¬
ture is Schleiermacher’s notion of the interconnectedness of ethics,
dialectics, and hermeneutics to the theory of translation as a com¬
municative, cultural, and sociopolitical act. Schleiermacher claims
that the desire to translate is to be understood positively, as a desire
to build community and thus understanding. It is not, at least his
intention does not rest in, a desire to cathect, dominate, or domesti¬
cate the foreign.6
Schleiermacher’s essay has been hailed as the first systematic ex-
FAULL: INTRODUCTION 15
amination of translation in the modern era, in that he distinguishes

between the act of interpreting and translating. Interpreting be¬
longs to the realm of business, commerce, and science where the
communication of facts over the use of language and the subjectivity
of the author is emphasized. Translation rests primarily in the realm
of philosophy and literature, where the use of language and notions
of style and intention are of paramount importance. Schleier-
macher is one of the hrst theorists of translation to suggest that a
translator cannot merely find an equivalent in the target language
because texts are the products of subjectivities within a linguistic en¬
vironment. Rather, the translator must retain the linguistic and cul¬
tural context of the mother tongue text in the translated foreign lan¬
guage text to as great an extent as possible. In his argument for the
retention of “otherness” within translation, Schleiermacher puts
forward the concept of “foreignizing” the mother tongue, an act
that would not, however, be appropriate to the act of interpretation,
as he has defined it (although readers of instructions manuals may
claim that also here there is a high degree of “foreignizing”). He
demands that aspects of the original language must be incorporated
into the target language in order to enrich the latter, to make it into
a language that can support a “Weltliteratur” or world-class litera¬
ture.7 Such foreignizing is only possible, Schleiermacher claims, in a
language that contains within it the flexibility to open up to other¬
ness. As we have found in Schleiermacher’s ethical theory, language
is constitutive of subjectivity, and like the ethical subject should be
able to accommodate otherness without eradicating, suppressing, or
hierarchizing it.8 Thus, I would argue that although the develop¬
ment of German and the state of Prussia is certainly Schleiermach¬
er’s concern (in a general politicocultural sense), his intellectual
project consists far more in the exploration of the hermeneutical
and ethical space of translation in the treatment of the target lan¬
guage text and the foreign language text as subjects (or as products
of subjectivities).
Foreignizing the Domestic or Domesticating the Foreign?
Translation, then, consists in the communication of “the individ¬

ual power of verbal expression of the author” and the “spirit of the
language with its own system of intuitions and gradations of mood.”9
The task of the translator is to reproduce the relationship between
the reader and the text in the original in the foreign language, bear¬
ing in mind that the foreign reader does not share the same cultural
vocabulary. Schleiermacher argues that neither of the extant modes

of translation—paraphrase and imitation—are satisfactory methods
to translate the “Wirkung” or effect of the original on its reader-
ship. Paraphrase approaches the meaning of the original, not
through literal translation but through the addition of phrases and
words and can thus communicate the context but not the feeling or
“impression” left by the text. If the translator attempts to explain
the psychological and cultural connections in the language in par¬
enthetical clauses or footnotes the translation can become more of
a commentary on the foreign-language text. Imitation, on the other
hand, produces a version of the text which is different from the orig¬
inal in its details but whose effect comes as close as the material
allows. According to Schleiermacher, this “translation” then be¬
comes a separate work of art.
To summarize the choices open to the translator, Schleiermacher
formulates the following: “Either the translator leaves the author as
much as possible in peace and moves the reader towards him or he
leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him.”10
Schleiermacher’s preference is for the former method, what we
have termed the foreignizing translation, in that through this mode
of translation the reader of the translated text is constantly aware of
the presence of the foreign and takes pleasure in its otherness.11
Given the different histories and etymologies of languages, Schleier¬
macher admits that it is impossible to replicate the system of rela¬
tions between word and etymology from one language to another,
but the translator should attempt to replicate the peculiarities of the
original and its musicality.
The question, of course, is whether readers, who are neither
scholars nor fellow translators, will like the product of such a for¬
eignizing translation. Schleiermacher asks, ironically, whether the
translator would not rather produce pure language like racially pure
children?12 In order to promote national consciousness would it not
be better to create “pure” culture? For anyone familiar with Schl¬
eiermacher’s ethics, hermeneutics, or theology such a suggestion is,
of course, an ironic fiction. However, some critics have read this
comment at face value, that is, as a serious rejection of “Blend-
linge,” or a middle way between a centripetal and a centrifugal cul¬
tural movement.13
Even today, critics and readers react with confusion and disap¬
proval at the foreignizing tendency in translation. Take for example,
a review in the Times Literary Supplement of Penelope Fitzgerald’s last
novel, The Blue Flower (1995). The reviewer, Gabriele Annan, has
nothing but praise for the novelist’s pointed use of detail, her spar-
ing description of German Romantic poet Novalis’s home life, her

sense of the grotesque, and her precise research into the life, work,
and times of the von Hardenberg family. She has one caveat, how¬
ever. Annan considers Fitzgerald’s use of German words, such as
Gaul, for horse or nag, and Germanisms such as “the Bernhard” or
“the Mandelsloh” to be “amusing” but, she adds, “she could man¬
age perfectly well without them.”14 Of course, this is not a transla¬
tion of a Novalis work, but Fitzgerald’s literary innovation is to for-
eignize English, to make the reader aware of the original language
milieu in which Novalis lived and worked, and to attempt to repro¬
duce the effect of the original (in this case Novalis’s poetry) on the
readership.
The critic Antoine Berman, himself a translator of Schleier-
macher, has also pointed out the dangers involved in Schleiermach-
er’s “foreignizing” method of translation. Berman worries that if
the attempt at foreignizing is unsuccessful there is the danger of
making the translation unintelligible, thereby making the foreign
more foreign. Furthermore, “the translator cannot be sure that the
other culture will not feel ‘robbed,’ deprived of a work it considered
irreducibly its own,” if the translation is successful. But this is a dan¬
ger that culture must face, because, Berman (after Schleiermacher)
argues, that every culture needs translation, even if it resists it:
The very aim of translation—to open up in writing a certain relation with

the Other, to fertilize what is one’s Own through the mediation of what
is Foreign—is diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure of
every culture, that species of narcissism by which every society wants to
be a pure and unadulterated Whole.
Echoing Schleiermacher’s comment on “Blendlinge,” Berman

continues: “There is a tinge of the violence of cross-breeding in
translation. Flerder was well aware of this when he compared a lan¬
guage that has not yet been translated to a young virgin. It is another
matter that in reality a virgin language is as fictitious as a pure race.”
For Berman, translation becomes “a dialogue, a cross-breeding, a
decentering” that can be effected only through the ethical fore¬
grounding of the “pure” aim of translation and the translator’s
awareness of the deformations (ideological and linguistic) that are
translation’s concomitants. In order for translation to be honest, the
translator has to make his or her subconscious desire to translate
(pulsion du traduire) conscious: “One might say that the metaphysi¬
cal purpose of translation is a bad sublimation of the translational
drive, whereas the ethical purpose is the surpassing of it.”15 Schleier-
macher describes the subconscious translational drive as the move¬

ment from the author to the reader, the act of domesticating the
foreign: Schleiermacher describes the ethical purpose of translation
as the foreignizing of the domestic, the attempt to rectify the transla¬
tional drive’s desire for sameness, the fictitious purity of language
and culture.
Berman has, however, been criticized for his “naive” reading of
Schleiermacher. Venuti argues that, although Schleiermacher does
promote a nonethnocentric theory of translation, he does so in the
name of a bourgeois middle class. Venuti does grant that for Schl¬
eiermacher translation is the object of textual interpretation that en¬
ables intersubjective understanding, but he still maintains:
Schleiermacher’s methodological distinction can be radical in this sense

only pour notre epoque, since he doesn’t describe the authentic translator’s
“aim” in ethical terms; rather his terms are social, with translation offer¬
ing an understanding of the foreign text which is not merely ethnocen¬
tric, but relative to a specific social group.
He continues: “Ultimately, it would seem that foreignizing transla¬

tion does not so much introduce the foreign into German culture
as use the foreign to confirm and develop sameness, a process of
fashioning an ideal cultural self on the basis of an other, a cultural
narcissism, which is endowed, moreover, with historical necessity.”16
What Venuti describes as Schleiermacher’s contribution to transla¬
tion theory is the provision of theoretical tools to conceptualize a
revolt against the valorization of transparent discourse in contempo¬
rary translation. But, he argues, it does so by turning Berman’s eth¬
ics of the cultural other into a politics of cultural difference.17
The Essays
How we view the foreign, either in a culture or text, determines

to a large degree the way we translate. The decision itself to translate
a text from another language and culture presupposes the question
of value of that text to the target language. This issue is brought up
in the first essay in this volume by Lawrence Venuti, in which he dis¬
cusses the question of retranslation and cultural politics. Examining
issues surrounding the institutions that promote and consume trans¬
lation, Venuti (like Schleiermacher) scrutinizes the agency (not just
linguistic and psychological) of the translator, including the politi¬
cal and cultural influence of translation. The role of institutions in
the production of cultural values is also discussed by Maryann De

Julio in her examination of French poetry and translation. Arne
Koch, Luise von Flotow, and Monika Giacoppe also pose questions
of the cultural politics of translation. Flow does translation affect the
question of regional identity in nineteenth-century Germany, the
feminist movement in North America, and the interaction between
French Quebecois and North American cultures?
Furthermore, the question as to the separability of language from
culture also determines the type of translation produced. For exam¬
ple, in Osman Durrani’s essay the question is posed whether one
can translate the language and culture of Austrian alpine life into
English, Italian, French, or Spanish. The historical and political
ramifications of this question are taken up further in Arne Koch’s
examination of the implications of translating regional dialects in
nineteenth-century Germany. Examining the works of writers such
as Theodore Storm and Fritz Reuter, Koch argues for the political
significance of intracultural and intercultural translation and the
necessity for the translation of minority culture.
What are the interactions of the practice of translation and the
multiple cultures that produce and receive a “foreign text”? In Sara
Friedman’s intriguing essay on the translation of names, she raises
the issue of the translatability of the “name.” It is perhaps on this
issue that her argument parallels Derrida’s in his essay, “What Is a
Relevant Translation?” when he claims that “I don’t believe that
anything can ever be untransalatable—or, moreover, translatable.”18
Here Derrida explores the “economy of inbetweenness” in transla¬
tion, that is, the movement in semantic space between the source
text and the target text, a gap that can perhaps be nowhere wider
than in the translation of the name. Similar issues are addressed in
Luise von Flotow’s essay. In the attempt to reproduce the verbal
sounds and puns of the source text in the target text (i.e., an attempt
to reproduce the effect of the linguistic innovations of the original
on the reader), does the translator abandon the semantic realm of
the original? In Monika Giacoppe’s examination of the translations
of Nicole Brossard and Gabriel Garda Marquez she asks the (Schl-
eiermacherian) question whether translation can aid communica¬
tion between cultures and comes to the optimistic conclusion that
even if the attempt to build bridges fails, the attempt is praiseworthy.
The cultures to be bridged through translation need not be sepa¬
rated by geographic space. The divide can be religious, ethnic, his¬
torical, and economic. In her essay on translation of myth, Jill Scott
celebrates the difference that translation produces, both between
the origin (however questionable that is as a category) and the pres-
ent. Arguing (with Schleiermacher) against a domestication of the

other, Scott claims that the very polysemy of myth must translate into
polyvalency in the target language or myth is dead.
The political relevance (no pun intended) of translation is the
focus of the contributions by both Ina Phtzner and Christi Merrill.
In Phtzner’s essay she explores the nexus with which I began this
introduction, that is, the interconnection between conquest and
translation and asks whether the political institution of the Euro¬
pean Union has now taken over the role of linguistic monitoring
that was in previous ages held by the Catholic Church. Christi Mer¬
rill’s provocative essay posits that despite Barthean claims to the con¬
trary, the author/translator is not “dead” or distanced and invisible,
but in the very translation of the central text of (post)-modernity
the translators place themselves clearly in view of the reader as the
authorities of meaning. This is, of course, the politics of translation,
the ethics of exchange in the attempt to traverse the space between
languages and cultures. Do we, as translators, show ourselves as the
carriers of meaning? Do we expose, lay bare, foreignize the meta¬
phor? It would seem from the body of this collection that the answer
must be a resounding “yes.” And having affirmed our visible role in
the transmission of knowledge/culture/language must we not also
do this with what Schleiermacher calls a consciousness of “ourselves
as other”?
Katherine M. Faull
Notes
1. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte
and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Jacques Derrida, “What Is a Relevant Translation?” trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical In¬
quiry 27 (winter 2001): 180.
4. Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary The¬
ory (New York: Routledge, 1997), 125.
5. The essay has been reprinted in German, “Uber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uber-
setzens,” in Friedrich Schleiermachers sammtliche Werke, Dritte Abtheilung: Zur Philosophic, vol. 2
(Berlin: Reimer, 1938), 207-45. A partial translation into English can be found in Theories of
Translation, 36-54.
6. For opposing viewpoints on this see Lawrence Venuti, “Translation as Cultural Politics:
Regimes of Domestication in English,” Textual Practice 7, no. 2 (1993): 208-23. This topic is
taken up again by Venuti in his introduction and translation of Derrida’s “What Is a Relevant
Translation? 172. Opposing Venuti on this is Antoine Berman. See especially his La traduc¬
tion et la lettre ou I’auberge du lointain (Paris: Seuil, 1999) and also his, “Presentation: Le pen¬
chant: a traduire, in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Des differentes methods du traduire et autre textes,
trans. A. Berman and C. Berner (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 12.
7. For an extended analysis of this emergence of German as a language of world-class liter¬

ature see Antoine Berman, The Expedience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Ger¬
many, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), especially chapter 4 on Goethe.
8. See my “Beyond Confrontation? The Early Schleiermacher and Feminist Moral The¬
ory,” New Atheneum/Neues Athenaeum 4 (1994): 41-65.
9. [D]as freie eigenthumliche combinatorische Vermogen des Verfassers [and the] Geist
der Sprache mit dem in ihr niedergelegten System der Anschauungen unci Abschattung der
Gemuthsstimmungen, in Sdmmtliche Werke, 3.2.210 f.; my translation. Thus we see here that
even in his notion of translation there exists the distinction between the individual and the
universal in the concept of individual expression that is seen also in Schleiermacher’s herme¬
neutics. This also forms his argument against the possibility of machine translation. He fur¬
ther argues that even if there were a perfect correspondence between two languages in lexi¬
con and syntax, and the job of translating were as mechanical as interpreting (dolmetschen),
and the foreign reader stood in exactly the same relationship to the author and his or her
work, then it would still be necessary not to have just a machine to translate because a) the
above is impossible and b) every subject and his or her thought is under the power of lan¬
guage—both s/he and his or her thought are products of the same, but at the same time
they inhabit a unique linguistic world, in that every thinking person forms his or her own
language.
10. Entweaer der Ubersetzer laBt den Schriftsteller moglichst in Ruhe, und bewegt den
Leser ihm entgegen; oder er laBt den Leser moglichst in Ruhe und bewegt den Schriftsteller
ihm entgegen, in Sdmmtliche Werke, 3.2.218; my translation.
11. “[D]er Ubersetzer muB also sich zum Ziel stecken, seinem Leser ein solches Bild und
einen solchen GenuB zu verschaffen, wie das Lesen des Werkes in der Ursprache dem so geb-
ildeten Manne gewahrt, den wir im besseren Sinne des Worts den Liebhaber und Kenner zu
nennen pflegen, dem die fremde Sprache gelaufigst, aber doch immer fremde bleibt, der
nicht mehr wieder in der Muttersprache denken muB, ehe er das Ganze fassen kann, der aber
doch . . . sich irnmer der Verschiedenheit der Sprache von seiner Mutterspache bewuBt
bleibt,” ibid., 222.
12. “Wer mochte nicht lieber Kinder erzeugen, die das vaterliche Geschlecht rein darstel-
len, als Blendlinge?” ibid., 227.
13. This comment has been the object of one of Anthony Pym’s major criticisms of Schl-
eiermacher's position. See Pym, “Schleiermacher and the Problem of Blendlinge,” Translation-
and-Literature 4, no. 1 (1995): 5-30. Pym interprets Schleiermacher’s notion of culture as ex¬
clusionary and argues that for Schleiermacher it is culturally impossible to belong to more
than one place. “Such translation works against multilingualism, against the mixing of lan¬
guages and cultures, and often against the survival of sub-national dialects” (21). Pym contin¬
ues his attack by claiming that Schleiermacher ignores the substance of the mediators and
thus his text becomes “a campaign against interculturality” (22).
14. Times Literary Supplement, 15 September 1995, 20.
15. Berman, Experience of the Foreign, 3, 4, 8.
16. Lawrence Venuti, “Genealogies of Translation Theory: Schleiermacher,” Traduction
Terminologie Redaction 4, no. 2 (1991): 125-50.
17. Ibid., 146.
18. Derrida, “What Is a Relevant Translation?” 178.
BUCKNELL REVIEW

Re translations: The Creation of Value
Lawrence Venuti
Temple University
Inscriptions and Institutions
T RANSLATION, like every cultural practice, involves the cre¬

ation of values, linguistic and literary, religious and political,
commercial and educational, as the particular case may be. What
makes translation unique is that the value-creating process takes the
form of an inscribed interpretation of a foreign-language text,
whose own values inevitably undergo diminution and revision to ac¬
commodate those that appeal to domestic cultural constituencies.
Translation is an inscription of the foreign text with intelligibilities
and interests that are fundamentally domestic, even when the trans¬
lator maintains a strict semantic equivalence with the foreign text
and incorporates aspects of the foreign-language cultural context
where that text first emerged.1 Re translations constitute a special
case because the values they create are likely to be doubly domestic,
determined not only by the domestic values which the translator in¬
scribes in the foreign text, but also by the values inscribed in a previ¬
ous version. Of course, retranslations may be inspired primarily by
the foreign text and produced without any awareness of a preexist¬
ing translation. The cases to be considered here, however, possess
this crucial awareness and justify themselves by establishing their dif¬
ferences from one or more previous versions.
These differences may first be introduced with the choice of a for¬
eign text for retranslation, but they subsequently proliferate with the
development of discursive strategies to retranslate it. Moreover, both
the choice and the strategies are shaped by the re translator’s appeal
to the domestic constituencies who will put the retranslation to vari¬
ous uses. A typical case is the choice of a foreign text that has
achieved canonical status in the translating culture. The sheer cul¬
tural authority of this text—the Bible, for instance, the Homeric
epics, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s plays, or Cervantes’s Don
Quixote—is likely to solicit retranslation because diverse domestic
25
readerships will seek to interpret it according to their own values

and hence develop different retranslation strategies that inscribe
competing interpretations. Here the choice of the text for retransla¬
tion is premised on an interpretation that differs from that inscribed
in a previous version, which is shown to be no longer acceptable be¬
cause it has come to be judged as insufficient in some sense, perhaps
erroneous, lacking linguistic correctness. The retranslation may
claim to be more adequate to the foreign text in whole or part,
which is to say more complete or accurate in representing the text
or some specific feature of it. Claims of greater adequacy, complete¬
ness, or accuracy should be viewed critically, however, because they
always depend on another category, usually an implicit basis of com¬
parison between the foreign text and the translation which estab¬
lishes the insufficiency and therefore serves as a standard of judg¬
ment. This standard is a competing interpretation.
The issue of readership is especially important with retranslations
that are housed in social institutions. Generally, a translation that
circulates in such a setting contributes to the identity formation of
the agents who function within it, to their acquisition of values that
constitute qualifications, and so a translation can affect the opera¬
tion and reproduction of the institution.2 Retranslations are de¬
signed deliberately to form particular identities and to have particu¬
lar institutional effects. In religious institutions, re translations help
to define and inculcate orthodox belief by inscribing canonical texts
with interpretations that are compatible with prevailing theological
doctrine. In academic institutions, similarly, retranslations help to
define and inculcate valid scholarship by inscribing canonical texts
with interpretations that currently prevail in scholarly disciplines.
Re translations can thus maintain and strengthen the authority of
a social institution by reaffirming the institutionalized interpreta¬
tion of a canonical text. Alternatively, retranslations can challenge
that interpretation in an effort to change the institution or found a
new one. The King James Bible consolidated the authority of the
Anglican Church during the early seventeenth century by drawing
on the Protestant versions of previous English translators, such as
William Tyndale and Richard Taverner. Yet before the Reformation
in England Tyndale’s translations were considered heretical and
subversive by the Roman Catholic Church because they ran counter
to the Vulgate by introducing interpretations grounded in Protes¬
tant theology.
Since the 1970s, to cite a scholarly example, the retranslations of
Thomas Mann’s fiction by the Germanist David Luke have asserted
the authority of academic specialists in German literature by locat-
VENUTI: RETRANSLATIONS 27
ing and correcting linguistic errors in Helen Lowe-Porter’s earlier

versions. Lowe-Porter, despite her errors, had already established
Mann as a major twentieth-century fiction writer among British and
American readers several decades before Luke’s retranslations. The
shifts between the German texts and her versions were not always
erroneous deviations from semantic equivalence, but interpreta¬
tions informed by her cultural situation: she was writing for a gen¬
eral readership in the Linked States during the early twentieth cen¬
tury. Academics like Luke wished to correct her work so as to bring
translations of Mann in line with current scholarly interpretations
that situate his fiction in German literary traditions. In the 1990s,
much to the dismay of Luke and his colleagues, John Woods success¬
fully brought Mann to a new generation of general readers through
retranslations that reflect contemporary English usage. The English
retranslations of Mann have become the site where two kinds of in¬
stitutions, the academic discipline and the commercial publisher,
have competed over the interpretation of the German texts.3
A foreign text that is positioned on the margin of literary canons
in the translating language may be retranslated in a bid to achieve
canonicity through the inscription of a different interpretation. Al¬
though the prolific Italian fiction writer Grazia Deledda won the
Nobel Prize for literature in 1926, her work has tended to be re¬
garded merely as a variety of regionalism, a representation of family
life in her native Sardinia. Hence, very few of her many books were
translated into English at the beginning of the twentieth century,
and she remained marginal in relation to such novelists as the
flamboyantly decadent Gabriele D’Annunzio and the sensationalist
racconteur of bourgeois decadence, Alberto Moravia. In the 1980s
and 1990s, however, Deledda’s strong female characters attracted
feminist-oriented English-language translators who made available
several texts, one of which was a retranslation. Similarly, the feminist
interest in rediscovering neglected women writers played a role in
the retranslation of Sibilla Aleramo’s autobiographical text Una
donna by Rosalind Delmar for the British feminist press Virago.4 As
these examples suggest, retranslations of marginal texts are likely to
be motivated by a cultural political agenda in which a particular ide¬
ology guides the choice of a foreign author or text and the develop¬
ment of a retranslation strategy.
Retranslations can help to advance translation studies by illumi¬
nating several key issues that bear directly on practice and research,
but that can be most productively explored only when a linguistic
operation or a textual analysis is linked to the cultural and political
factors that invest it with significance and value. Foremost among
these issues is the translator’s agency, the ensemble of motivations,

conditions, and consequences that decisively inform the work of
translating and allow it to produce far-reaching social effects. The
translator’s actions also involve the creation of an intertextual di¬
mension for the translated text, a network of relations, not only to
the foreign text, but to other texts written in the translating lan¬
guage. And the issues of agency and intertextuality ultimately point
to the role of history in translation, not only the influence of the
historical moment in which the translator works, but the literary and
cultural histories on which the translator draws to bring the foreign
text into the translating language.
Agency
Any translating is obviously intended action: a translator aims to

rewrite a foreign text in another language, reproducing its specific¬
ity as much as linguistic and cultural differences permit and audi¬
ences require. As Anthony Giddens has argued, furthermore, in¬
tended action involves a “reflexive self-monitoring’’ in which the
agent submits his or her behavior to ongoing evaluation according
to “rules and resources” that already exist in a social situation.5 The
translator’s intention, then, is always already collective, determined
most decisively by linguistic usage, literary canons, translation tradi¬
tions, and the commissioning institution. A comparable line of
thinking has been developed specifically for translation by Gideon
Toury, who has argued that a translator evaluates his or her deci¬
sions according to “norms” or values in the translating culture.6 Lin¬
guistic and cultural norms determine not only the selection of for¬
eign texts for translation, but the strategies devised to translate them
and the relations of equivalence established between the foreign
and translated texts. The norms may be formulated in precise terms
by a client or institution who commissions a translation so as to pro¬
duce a particular effect for a particular audience. This is usually the
case with technical or pragmatic documents, as Hans Vermeer has
indicated,7 since the function of the translation can be defined in a
contract and a standardized language may already exist to serve that
function. More often, however, translation norms are assimilated
through the translator’s education and experience working with cli¬
ents.
Giddens allows us to extend this thinking about the translator’s
agency by pointing out that intended action also involves “unac¬
knowledged conditions” and “unanticipated consequences” which
can affect social reproduction, whether by maintaining the status

quo or by leading to change. Translators do in fact make many deci¬
sions automatically, without any critical reflection on the norms that
constrain their work. Even when an experienced translator is capa¬
ble of articulating these norms wholly or in part, the translating will
proceed amid conditions that remain preconscious or subliminal,
even entirely unconscious. These conditions may include pertinent
informadon about the foreign culture, author, or text, the canon
of the foreign literature in translation, translation traditions in the
receiving culture, the interpretation that the translator inscribes in
the foreign text, and the ways in which the publisher plans to print,
market, and promote the translation. Such unacknowledged condi¬
tions subtly overdetermine the translating, which can therefore re¬
sult in consequences that the translator did not anticipate, especially
consequences for reception. A translation may be judged unaccept¬
able by readerships who possess the information that the translator
lacked, who value the literary canon or translation tradition that the
translator unwittingly challenged, who interpret the foreign text dif¬
ferently from the translator, or who are alienated by the publisher’s
practices. If the translator succeeds in appealing to an intended au¬
dience, the translation may nonetheless be read by a different audi¬
ence who finds it unacceptable. The commissioning institution may
engage in practices that remain unknown to the translator, but that
enable the translation to produce unforeseen social effects which
are ethically and politically questionable. Thus a translation of an
instruction manual could conceivably contribute to patterns of ex¬
ploitation established by a multinational corporation in its treat¬
ment of overseas workforces.
In the case of retranslations, the translator’s agency is distin¬
guished by a significant increase in self-consciousness that seeks to
take into account the manifold conditions and consequences of the
translating. Re translations typically highlight the translator’s inten-
tionality because they are designed to make an appreciable differ¬
ence. The retranslator’s intention is to select and interpret the for¬
eign text according to a different set of values so as to bring about a
new and different reception for that text in the translating culture.
The retranslator is likely to be aware, then, not only of the compet¬
ing interpretations inscribed in the foreign text by a previous ver¬
sion and by the retranslation, but the linguistic and cultural norms
that give rise to these interpretations, such as literary canons and
translation traditions. A retranslator may aim to maintain, revise, or
displace norms and the institutions in which they are housed.
Re translations can also call attention to the overdetermining role
of a commissioning institution, which may require the translator to

work with a particular foreign text and discursive strategy to enforce
a particular ideology. A commercially oriented publisher may de¬
cide to issue retranslations of foreign canonical texts that have fallen
into the public domain simply because their canonicity ensures a
market demand and they are cheaper to publish than copyrighted
texts, which require the purchase of translation rights from a for¬
eign author or his assignees. Hence, an ideology of commercialism
will govern the selection of a foreign text for retranslation and dic¬
tate a discursive strategy that enhances the readability of the transla¬
tion to ensure sales. A publisher driven by a profit motive may in
fact wish to save the expense of commissioning a retranslation by
reprinting a previous translation that has proven itself in the market¬
place, even if in a revised version. In the United States, this has been
the practice of a publisher like Random House, who kept reprinting
the Scott Moncrieff version of Proust and subsequently brought out
a revised version.8 Yet even small literary publishers may be forced
to economize in this way so as to continue issuing translations of ca¬
nonical texts that might nonetheless interest a limited audience. In
1999, Vermont-based Steerforth Press reissued Angus Davidson’s
1951 translation of Moravia’s novel II conformista in a revised version;
in the same year, London-based Prion Books reprinted Davidson’s
translation without revision.9
Of course a retranslation may be motivated by no more than the
retranslator’s personal appreciation and understanding of the for¬
eign text, regardless of transindividual factors. Retranslators of ca¬
nonical poets like Virgil and Catullus, Baudelaire and Montale rou¬
tinely justify their projects solely on the basis of the aesthetic values
they perceive in the foreign-language text. Yet insofar as every trans¬
lation inscribes the foreign text with an interpretation informed by
the foreign and translating cultures, insofar as a foreign author en¬
joys a canonical status in the translating culture and translations of
the author’s work continue to interest publishers, transindividual
factors inevitably enter into translation projects that seem simply an
expression of the translator’s literary taste and sensibility. Moreover,
even when a retranslator has gained a sophisticated awareness of the
conditions and consequences that accompany a complex action like
translating, this awareness can never be omniscient, nor can it ever
give the retranslator complete control over transindividual factors.
A case in point is Quebecois translation after 1968, when the na¬
tionalist movement emerged to demand political autonomy for
Quebec. As Annie Brisset has shown,10 drama translations were pro¬
duced to form a national cultural identity. Nationalist writers, poets
as well as lexicographers, fashioned Quebecois French into a native

or mother tongue, a language of community, while translators
worked to turn it into the support of a national literature by render¬
ing canonical world dramatists, such as Shakespeare, Strindberg,
Chekhov, and Brecht. The goal was to endow Quebecois French
with cultural authority so as to challenge its subordination to domi¬
nant languages, notably North American English and Parisian
French. A key strategy in achieving this goal was the retranslation of
canonical drama that had previously been available only in the
French of France. The rarely acknowledged conditions of this na¬
tionalist project included the linguistic and cultural differences of
the foreign-language texts, as well as a sizeable immigrant popula¬
tion whose native language was not any dialect of French. Hence, in
attempting to construct a homogeneous national identity on the
basis of Quebecois French, the retranslations entailed an ethnocen¬
tric reduction of other languages and cultures and thereby set up
hierarchies that were just as exclusionary as those that had subordi¬
nated Quebec.
Intertextuality
The translator’s agency centers on the construction of intertex-

tual relations, starting with the production of a text that relates to
another, foreign text. Yet the forms of intertextuality that a transla¬
tor might construct are diverse and always figurative. They never re¬
sult in an exact or literal reproduction of the foreign text, but rather
establish a ratio of loss and gain through an interpretive inscription
that is shaped by different linguistic structures and cultural dis¬
courses. Thus, in constructing a relation to the foreign text, a trans¬
lation is also linked to other texts written in the translating lan¬
guage.
Perhaps the most prevalent intertextual relation in translating is
analogical or metaphoric: for the chain of signihers that constitutes
the foreign text, the translator substitutes another signifying chain
in the translating language on the basis of a semantic similarity that
relies upon current definitions for foreign-language lexical items. In
this case, the equivalence is properly called lexicographical; the in¬
tertext consists of relations to dictionaries. Such metaphoric rela¬
tions can be misleading by suggesting that a one-to-one correspon¬
dence exists between the foreign and translated texts when in fact
the translator has limited the correspondence to a reductive seman¬
tic core that may not take into account additional aspects of mean-
ing or more complicated intertextual relations. When in his version

of Antonio Tabucchi’s novel Sostiene Pereira (1994) the British trans¬
lator Patrick Creagh renders the Italian sentence “sono nei guai” [I
am in trouble] as “I’m in a pickle” or the phrase “un personaggio
del regime” [a figure in the regime] as “bigwig,”11 he establishes a
semantic equivalence that is approximate, to be sure, but can none¬
theless be readily perceived. Yet Creagh’s choices also establish an
intertextual relation: they introduce shifts in dialect (toward British
English) and in register (toward colloquialism) that link the Italian
novel to English literary forms, for instance, the underworld thriller.
An alternative intertextual relation is metonymic: a translation
might focus on recreating specific parts of the foreign text which
acquire significance and value in relation to literary trends and tra¬
ditions in the translating culture. In rendering the poetry of the dol-
cestilnovisti, Ezra Pound was occasionally “preserving one value of
early Italian work, the cantabile,” sacrificing various stylistic features
for songlike metrical effects that evoke the Elizabethan lyric.12 Trans¬
lations might also be ironic or parodic, constructing an intertextu-
ality that ridicules or burlesques the foreign text, such as the seven¬
teenth-century French and Italian versions that travestied the
AeneidP’
Of course intertextual relations may escape the translator’s con¬
scious control because they fall either among the unacknowledged
conditions of the translation or among its unanticipated conse¬
quences when it is read by different audiences. And in the effort to
recreate a stylistic innovation in a foreign literary text, the translator
may produce a “fidelity” that is, as Philip Lewis has argued,14 doubly
“abusive”: innovative translating may not only deviate from the
structures and discourses of the translating language and culture,
but criticize the foreign text by pointing toward interpretations and
effects that the foreign author did not anticipate.
Because retranslations are designed to challenge a previous ver¬
sion of the foreign text, they are likely to construct a more dense
and complex intertextuality so as to signify and call attention to
their competing interpretation. The Quebecois retranslations of ca¬
nonical world drama distinguished themselves from the Parisian
French versions by drawing on dialects that were described by Que¬
becois lexicographers, used by Quebecois playwrights and poets,
and championed by polemical defenders of Quebecois French.
Pound’s versions of Guido Cavalcanti’s poetry were in some cases
retranslations that drew on “pre-Elizabethan” English poets such as
Sir Thomas Wyatt to recreate values that Pound found “obfuscated”
by the pre-Raphaelite medievalism of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ver-
sions {PC, 243, 250). The more dense and complex such intertextual
relations, the more a retranslation risks effacing the linguistic and
cultural differences of the foreign text to serve a domestic cultural
politics. Pound was nonetheless able to register these differences
through his modernist poetic agenda because his translation dis¬
course cultivated an archaism that noticeably deviated from current
English usage and dominant poetic styles.
Through links to cultural discourses in the translating language,
retranslations may select and narrow their audience to those readers
who possess the specialized knowledge to recognize the intertextu-
ality and hence the new interpretation inscribed by the retranslator.
Yet because general readers may in fact know a previous version,
they may perceive the difference signaled by a retranslation even
when they fail to recognize a particular intertextual connection.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky retranslated Dostoevsky’s
novel The Brothers Karamazov by adhering closely to the Russian text,
reproducing its peculiar stylistic innovations and challenging previ¬
ous renderings that resorted to freedoms to increase readability, no¬
tably the Edwardian version of Constance Garnett.15 General readers
who know Garnett’s version will be immediately struck by what seem
to be the peculiarities of the closer retranslation. Moreover, Pevear
and Volokhonsky are writerly translators, not scholars, yet a scholarly
reader familiar with twentieth-century literary theory and criticism
may notice a striking resemblance between their retranslation and
the interpretation of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who
viewed Dostoevsky’s novels as “dialogic” or “polyphonic,” charac¬
terized by a heterogeneous, multivocal style.1*' The intertextual rela¬
tions established by a retranslation might thus encompass an under¬
standing of the foreign text that is shared by native readers as well.
Or in the effort to surpass a previous version the intertext of a re¬
translation may exceed and even criticize the foreign culture where
the text first emerged. Gary Wills suggested that Robert Fagles’s ver¬
sion of the Odyssey reflected the questioning of traditional gender
roles effected by American feminist movements, a questioning that
is obviously at odds with the gender inequalities of ancient Greece.17
A retranslation is sometimes accompanied by a more immediate
form of intertextuality, paratexts, which signal its status as a retrans¬
lation and make explicit the competing interpretation that the
retranslator has tried to inscribe in the foreign text. Paratexts are
supplementary materials that may include introductions and after¬
words, annotations and commentaries, even the endorsements of ac¬
ademic specialists and the publisher’s advertising copy. Pound’s
prefaces and notes to his versions of Cavalcanti, along with his sepa-
rately published essays, rationalized his choice and interpretation of

the foreign text as well as his translation strategies. Vladimir Nabo¬
kov’s retranslation of Pushkin’s Onegin maintained a close lexico¬
graphical equivalence and added copious annotations to question
the accuracy of previous versions that relied on what he called “po¬
etical” strategies, free renderings and rhyme schemes. Nabokov’s
commentary in annotations as well as separately published essays
sought to reconstruct the literary context of the poem, the intertex-
tual network in which the Russian text was embedded and with
which academic specialists are familiar.18 Paratexts might go some
way toward restoring the linguistic and cultural differences that
translation necessarily removes from the foreign text by rewriting it
in another language with different cultural traditions.
History
Translations are profoundly linked to their historical moment be¬

cause they always reflect the cultural formation where they are pro¬
duced, the hierarchical arrangement of values that circulate in insti¬
tutions and undergo various developments over time. The cultural
formation mediates every stage of the translation process, from the
choice of a foreign text to the invention of discursive strategies to
the reception of the translated text by particular audiences. Thus,
literary translators are often led to favor certain foreign texts and
genres by prevailing literary trends. In eighteenth-century Britain,
the dominance of a neoclassical aesthetic was instrumental in the
repeated translation of classical epics, whereas during the nine¬
teenth century the rise of romantic expressivism encouraged British
translators to render classical lyric poetry that had hitherto been ne¬
glected. In this case, the canonical status of the foreign literature
remained constant in the translating culture, which, however, un¬
derwent a change in aesthetic values that stimulated a later revalua¬
tion of that literature.
Discursive strategies reveal the historicity of a translation in the
very texture of its language. The translator’s invention of a lexicon
and syntax for the foreign text may draw on dialects or styles that
prevail during the period when the translation is produced. Wyatt’s
Petrarch, Florio’s Montaigne, Pope’s Homer, Rose’s Orlando Furioso,
FitzGerald’s Rubyiat, Pound’s Cathay exhibit linguistic structures and
stylistic features that link them to certain moments in the histories
of the English language and English literatures. A translation may
be characterized by linguistic variations that are favored by transla-
tors at specific historical moments. The pre-Raphaelite medievalism

of Rossetti’s dolcestilnovisti or the Jacobean English in Benjamin Jow-
ett’s Plato typify the strain of poetical archaism in Victorian transla¬
tions, whereas the mixture of archaism with modern colloquialism
in Paul Blackburn’s versions of Provencal troubadours typifies the
modernist experimentalism in translation. The interpretation that a
translator inscribes through a discursive strategy also carries an his¬
torical significance since it may mirror or revise values that prevail
at particular moments in the translating culture. At the end of the
nineteenth century, the Chinese translator Lin Shu sought to
strengthen imperial culture by rendering such Western novelists as
Dickens into the classical prose instead of the vernacular and by in¬
scribing them with Confucian moral concepts. Ultimately, discursive
strategies point to historically specific standards of accuracy, making
clear that even definitions of translation vary from period to period.
The Abbe Prevost regarded his work on Samuel Richardson’s Clar¬
issa as faithful translating, even though he reduced the seven En¬
glish volumes to four in French. Today we would obviously consider
the Abbe not simply a translator, but an adaptor and editor as well.
Retranslations deliberately mark the passage of time by aiming to
distinguish themselves from a previous version through differences
in discursive strategies and interpretations. Since they rely on a
more dense and complicated intertextuality to produce these differ¬
ences, they are likely to defamiliarize the foreign text as well as
forms and traditions in the translating culture. During the 1920s
Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig rendered the Hebrew Bible
into German so as to evoke the oral quality of the Hebrew and to
distinguish their Jewish interpretation from Luther’s Christian ver¬
sion.19 Hence, they deviated from standard usage by Hebraicizing
their syntax and by inserting archaisms and stylistic devices, notably
Buber’s “Leitworte,” or leitmotifs, the modernist technique of cre¬
ating recurrent patterns in a work of art. As a result, their translation
not only cast the Hebrew Bible in a different light, but introduced a
note of foreignness into the German language. And since Wagner
had powerfully developed leitmotifs in his operas, the use of this
technique to translate the canonical Hebrew text also unsettled Ger¬
man cultural traditions at a moment when they were increasingly
invested with nationalist and racist ideologies.
Re translations are not merely historical in their affiliations with a
specific moment, but historiographical in their effort to signal and
rationalize their differences from previous versions through various
narrative genres and often through a mixture of them. Perhaps the
most common genre here is romance, according to Hayden White’s
classification,20 where the historical narrative is evolutionary, or pro¬

gressive, culminating in some form of transcendence—here a tran¬
scendence, not of the difficulties in translating the foreign text, but
of the defects that are perceived to have marred an earlier render¬
ing. Thus, retranslations are often presented as a significant im¬
provement because they rely on a definitive edition of the foreign
text which was not formerly available or because they employ a dis¬
cursive strategy that maintains a more strict semantic or stylistic
equivalence. Some retranslations do no more than update the trans¬
lating language. An editor at the New York Times responded favorably
to John Woods’s retranslation of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic
Mountain solely because Helen Lowe-Porter’s language has come to
seem antiquated and Woods used the current standard dialect of En¬
glish.21
Alternatively, a retranslation may be conservative, premised on a
satiric historical narrative. Here the retranslator criticizes a previous
version, but casts doubt on the notion of progress in translation and
returns to a discursive strategy or interpretation that was developed
in the past while admitting its inadequacy. Nabokov thus justified
his close, unrhymed retranslation of Onegin by arguing that previous
English versions were “grotesque travesties of their model, rendered
in dreadful verse, teeming with mistranslations” (TSR, 78). Yet he
could only hope for a “reasonable accuracy” that relied on annota¬
tions (TSR, 83). A retranslation may also be premised on a comedic
narrative of reconciliation, in which a discursive strategy is used to
bring the foreign text to a hitherto excluded readership or to cross
the cultural boundaries between readerships. The Penguin Classics
originated, in fact, in just such a project of making available to mass
audiences classical literature that had previously been accessible to
scholars and university-educated readers.
Retranslations reflect changes in the values and institutions of the
translating culture, but they can also produce such changes by in¬
spiring new ways of reading and appreciating foreign texts. To study
retranslations is to realize that translating can’t be viewed as a simple
act of communication because it creates values in social formations
at specific historical moments, and these values redefine the foreign
text and culture from moment to moment. To retranslate is to con¬
front anew and more urgently the translator’s ethical responsibility
to prevent the translating language and culture from effacing the
foreignness of the foreign text. The lesson of retranslation is that
this responsibility can be met most effectively by allowing the re¬
translator’s situation, especially the existence of a previous version,
to open up new paths of invention so as to inscribe a competing in-
terpretation. It is only through the inscription that a translator can

hope to make a linguistic and cultural difference that signals the for¬
eign at home.
Notes
1. I argue this point at length, with special reference to British and American translation
traditions and practices, in The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York:
Roudedge, 1995).
2. For a discussion of the identity-forming capacity of translation, especially within institu¬
tions, see my study The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (New York:
Roudedge, 1998), 75-81, 103-4.
3. For a fuller discussion, see ibid., 32-33. These points can also be inferred from an ex¬
change in the Times Literary Supplement which was prompted by Timothy Buck’s essay, “Neither
the letter nor the spirit: Why most English translations of Thomas Mann are so inadequate,”
13 October 1995, 17. See particularly the letters to the editor from David Luke, 8 December
1995, 15, and Lawrence Venuti, 22 December 1995, 17.
4. The retranslations I have in mind here are Grazia Deledda, After the Divorce, trans. Susan
Ashe (London: Quartet, 1985), and Sibilla Aleramo, A Woman, trans. Rosalind Delmar (Lon¬
don: Virago, 1979). The first versions were After the Divorce, trans. Maria H. Lansdale (New
York: Henry Holt, 1905), and A Woman at Bay, trans. Maria H. Lansdale (New York: Putnam,
1908).
5. See Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction
in Social Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), chap. 2.
6. See Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Philadelphia: Benjamins,
1995), 53-69.
7. See Hans Vermeer, “Skopos and Commission in Translation Action,” in Lawrence Ven¬
uti, ed., The Translation Studies Reader (New York: Roudedge, 2000), 221-32. Hereafter TSR,
cited in the text.
8. C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s version, Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random House,
1934), was revised by Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981). For an account of
the English translations of Proust’s novel, see Marilyn Gaddis Rose, “Proust,” in Peter France,
ed.. The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (New York: Oxford University Press,
2000), 292-94.
9. Alberto Moravia, The Conformist, trans. Angus Davidson, rev. Tami Calliope (South Roy-
alton, Ver.: Steerforth Press, 1999); trans. Angus Davidson (London: Prion Books, 1999).
10. See Annie Brisset, A Sociocritique of Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec, 1968-1988,
trans. Rosalind Gill and Roger Gannon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 162-94.
11. Antonio Tabucchi, Sostiene Pereira: Una testimonianza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1994), 73, 104;
Declares Pereira: A True Account, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Harvill, 1995), 45, 64.
12. David Anderson, ed., Pound’s Cavalacanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 248. Hereafter PC, cited in the text.
13. See, for example, Paul Scarron, Le Virgile travesti (1648), ed. Jean Seroy (Paris: Bordas,
1988).
14. Philip Lewis, “The Measure of Translation Effects,” in Joseph Graham, ed., Difference in
Translation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 31-62.
15. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Heine-
mann, 1912); trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco, Calif.: North
Point Press, 1990).
16. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: Uni¬
versity of Minnesota Press, 1984).
17. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Random House, 1997). Gary
Wills’s review appeared in the New Yorker, 27 January 1997, 94-99.
18. See, for example, Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” Par¬
tisan Review 22 (1955): 496-512; reprinted in Venuti, ed., Translation Studies Reader, 71-83.
19. See Klaus Reichert, “‘It Is Time’: The Buber-Rosenzweig Bible Translation in Con¬
text,” in Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds., The Translatability of Culture: Figurations of the
Space Between (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 169-85.
20. This point relies on Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nine¬
teenth Century (Baltimore, Md.: Thejohns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
21. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John Woods (New York: Knopf, 1995). The
review by D. J. R. Bruckner appeared in the New York Times Book Revieiu, 22 October 1995, 37.
Schlafes Bruder
Osman Durrani
University of Kent at Canterbury
Introduction
R OBERT Schneider’s first novel Schlafes Bruder received both

critical and popular acclaim on its publication in 1992. Since
then it has been translated into more than twenty languages and
filmed by Joseph Vilsmaier. It revolves around an isolated peasant
community in a remote valley of Austria’s Vorarlberg region at the
turn of the nineteenth century. The novel’s success rested to some
extent on its vivid portrayal of bizarre local customs and on its explo¬
ration of a unique social and geographic environment, the specifics
of which presented a challenge to translators whose readers were
unfamiliar with the region and its heritage.
This essay sets out to assess the achievements of four translators:
Shaun Whiteside (English), Claude Porcell (French), Miguel Saenz
(Spanish), and Flavio Cuniberto (Italian). Style, vocabulary, and
register proved problematic, and several key aspects of mountain
culture required precise local knowledge and sensitivity. Given their
partial understanding of the community described in Schlafes Bruder
and in view of the constraints of the linguistic medium in which they
were working, the translators had to develop strategies which, while
not always doing justice to the literal meaning of the text, were able
to offer solutions appropriate to the expectations of their target
readership. The four versions range from literal renderings via vari¬
ous degrees of embellishment to fanciful transpositions, and it will
be shown that, paradoxically, the least “accurate” translation is the
one that received the highest acclaim from its readers.
39
The Text
The object of this essay is to look at some of the methods that were
recently used to render a German-language novel into four Euro¬
pean languages by translators from different backgrounds. Each of
the translators was responsible for setting his own objectives and cri¬
teria while being bound by the constraints of a specific language and
tradition. The outcome will be to observe some of the interactions
between the cultures that resulted from their distinct approaches to
a single text. Fundamental to this exercise is the view that the effects
of translations are felt across many systemic frontiers and that their
individual qualities will be better understood by adopting a compar¬
ative approach. If we accept the view that the identity of a given text
is established and enhanced through various types of manipulation,
one of which is translation,1 this investigation will, it is hoped, also
contribute to a fuller understanding of the source text.
Schlafes Bruder, the novel chosen for this purpose, is the first novel
of a thirty-one-year-old writer from a remote village in Vorarlberg in
the extreme west of Austria. It tells the story of Johann Elias Alder, a
natural, untutored genius born, like its author, in the backwoods of
rural Austria. Alder is credited with the greatest musical talent the
world has ever known, but lives in misery and obscurity, before put¬
ting an end to his life as a result of an unrequited passion for Els-
beth, a girl from the same village. He dies a gruesome, self-inflicted
death, claiming that “he who loves, does not sleep.” There are
traces of bitterness but also of humor, of great passion and of cynical
detachment in this work, which provoked intense interest and no
less intense critical debate. In its first six years, Schlafes Bruder sold
over 1.3 million copies.2 It received much acclaim and not a few
prizes, both within and outside the German-speaking world, though
literary critics disagreed as to what was really special about it. Joseph
Vilsmaier made it into a him, released in 1995, and it was drama¬
tized, turned into an opera, and, inevitably, translated into many
languages.3
If one tries to look for the reasons behind its meteoric success,
one would have to mention the current popularity of the historical
novel with the German-speaking public, and maybe also a conspicu¬
ous affinity with Patrick Suskind’s Das Parfum of 1985, another novel
in which a studiously researched period background is used to set
off an unusually horrific tale. Both novels tell of an extraordinary
artistic talent that comes to fruition in a crude, uncouth, and pro¬
foundly antisocial individual. But Parfum, set in eighteenth-century
France, is narrated in a leisurely, almost conventional, manner so
DURRANI: TRANSLATING SCHNEIDER’S SCHLAFES BRUDER 41
that it poses no insurmountable problems for the translator. Schlafes

Bruder, on the other hand, makes use of many archaic and regional
terms which are a challenge to those unfamiliar with the customs of
western Austria. Readers from other parts of the world will inevitably
struggle with the vocabulary no less than with the author’s perspec¬
tive on the backward and bigoted environment in which his story is
set.
The narrative is far from uniform in its style. Siiskind’s Parfum has
recognizable qualities as a thriller about an obsessive serial mur¬
derer, a grotesque hybrid who is in part an artist and in part an un¬
tamed beast. Schneider’s novel is more difficult to describe. It has
some of the qualities of a Heimatroman—the regional emphasis is
strong, and the narrator frequently slips into archaic speech, homely
dialect, and doggerel. It partakes of a Germanic interest in a
thwarted artist, but also displays a characteristically Austrian skepti¬
cism about the simple life of the countryside, a theme that can be
traced back for over one hundred years, at least as far as Franz Mi¬
chael Felder’s autobiography. The reasons for Alder’s failure stem
from his isolation, a product of the insular nature of the country
folk, against whose pigheadedness Alder rebels, but which he ulti¬
mately shares. This is obliquely implied rather than stated, and the
descriptions of peasant rituals are presented as a fusion of gross rus¬
tic superstition and outrageously bizarre fantasy. To put this across
to an urban readership is not easy, especially if it involves translation
into a different idiom. But before considering the language of the
text, the “packaging” of the book as it was presented to readers in
languages other than the original will be considered.
The Title
When it comes to translating fiction and imaginative writing, the

most challenging part of the job is quite often the title. Why would
the Chinese turn “The English Patient” into the Mandarin equiva¬
lent of “Do Not Ask Me Who I Am—Ever”? Answer: to avoid the
unappetizing triteness of “The Sick Englishman.” This was gener¬
ally felt to be an improvement, a “translation gain.” But one won¬
ders why the Japanese for Ian Fleming’s Dr No is We Don’t Need a Doc¬
tor, and The Full Monty was released in China as Six Naked Pigs ': the
list of odd titles in translations is never-ending. In our present exam¬
ple, despite its simplicity—two nouns, one nominative, one geni¬
tive—there are several major obstacles to a straight, word-for-word
conversion, as the following comparison suggests:
German Schlafes Bruder

English Brother of Sleep
Greek O adelphos tou ipnou (The brother of sleep)
French Frere sommeil (Brother sleep)
Russian Sestra sna (Sleep’s sister)
Spanish Hermana del sueho (Sister of the dream)
Dutch Wie liefheeft slaapt niet (He that loves sleeps not)
Italian Le voci del mondo (The voices of the world)
First, there are languages in which “sleep” and “dream,” or “sleep”

and “fatigue,” are communicated by a single word; second, there
are those in which a definite article is either optional or required
before abstract nouns; third, there is the archaic sound of the Saxon
genitive in German; fourth, and perhaps most significantly, in most
languages other than German and Greek the word for “death” is
not masculine but feminine, thus rendering the metaphoric
“brother”5 inoperative. But of course, the linguistic and morpholog¬
ical factors are only part of the story. There are cultural factors
which remain to be investigated. Looking no further than the titles,
we might apply the following shorthand observations. English: lit¬
eral but unimaginative; French: elegant but inaccurate; Spanish: so¬
norous but ambivalent; Italian: grandiose but irrelevant.
The title has obvious importance not merely as a label or a de¬
scription, but as what effectively sells the book. One has to conclude
from the above that the Italian and Dutch translators were unable
to devise a formulation that resembled the structure of the original.
The Dutch version quotes a key line from the text; the Italian title,
however, seems to have been chosen at random.
The Cover Illustration
It is not only the title that defines a book; the cover is another
vital part of the package. All German editions display Albert Anker’s
Brustbild eines Knaben (Torso of a Boy) of 1896. Yet the four paperback
translations use very different illustrations. The U.S. edition charac¬
teristically opts for a tie-in with Vilsmaier’s him of 1995, while the
French Lime de poche edition uses Sandro Botticelli’s Portrait of a
Youth (from the National Gallery, London, circa 1485), possibly on
account of its prominently yellow eyes. The Spanish edition uses Re-
medios Varos’s Harmony (1956), which has magic realist features. An
Expressionist connection is introduced on the cover of the Italian
edition in the form of Marianne von Werefkin’s Red City, dating
from 1909.6 The effect of these images varies considerably. The
American edition is presented as “the book of the film,” the cluster

of starkly staring individuals clearly suggesting a racy account of jeal¬
ousy in a rural setting. The French cover reproduces the “haunting
stare” of a youth, even if he happens to be a wealthy Renaissance
Italian, in an image with a timeless quality, suggesting a tale of ge¬
nius and bringing out the supernatural intensity of the individual’s
feelings. In the picture chosen for the Spanish publication, the sur¬
real and absurd qualities are foregrounded, while the cover of the
Italian edition establishes a link with the expressive “woodcut” style
familiar from artistic movements in the early years of the twentieth
century.
Press Reviews: The Language of Schlafes Bruder
The press reviews of Schlafes Bruder revealed that German-speak¬

ing critics found the language of this novel to be unusually powerful
and varied. It was not easy for them to agree whether this language
was predominantly archaic or modern, characterized by local dialect
patterns or by outlandish vocabulary:
Above all else, his language possesses an unsettling power and at times
breath-taking elegance. The sentence structure and choice of vocabulary
extend back into the nineteenth century—and yet they are shot through
with modernisms. One moment the author avails himself of the Vorarl-
berg dialect, and then a cascade of foreign-sounding words floods
through the very next paragraph.7
In successive reviews, the antithetical terms impressionism and ex¬

pressionism were applied indiscriminately; baroque, neoromantic, and
postmodern are other terms favored by the analysts of Schneider’s
style. Thomas Rietzschel speaks of a “new Impressionism, a second
Jin de siecle” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, while in Zurich, Beatrice
von Matt recognized signs of neoexpressionist tendencies in Schnei¬
der’s style.8 The list of alleged influences reads like a catalogue of
literary terms familiar from the seventeenth to the twentieth centu¬
ries.9
It is generally agreed that it would be relatively easy to translate
texts from one language into another if there were no “nonstan¬
dard” features in them. These nonstandard features tend to belong
to one of three groups: regional (dialects), temporal (archaic
forms), and social (stylistic registers). When any of these are present
in any quantity, the ideal of “equivalence” becomes difficult to pur¬
sue. In the case of Schlafes Bruder, all three types are found in liberal
doses: regionalisms, obsolete vocabulary, and a highly idiosyncratic

style, or idiolect. As a literary text in which the writer not only uses
but also shapes his native language, Schlafes Bruder poses more prob¬
lems than most for its would-be translators.
The Translators
Among the translators who took up the challenge to turn this

complex work into their own languages are: Shaun Whiteside,
Claude Porcell, Miguel Saenz, and Flavio Cuniberto. It is relevant to
note that they all approached their labor from a slightly different
angle. Whiteside had previously translated Nietzsche’s The Birth of
Tragedy for Penguin; he has also translated from the French, a reveal¬
ing detail to which we shall return. He was responsible for the En¬
glish version of Klaus Wagenbach’s guide book to Kafka’s Prague.
Porcell is one of France’s most prolific translators of contemporary
Austrian and German avant-garde writing, responsible for French
versions of many of Thomas Bernhard’s texts, and has translated
books by Herbert Rosendorfer, Michael Kruger, Peter Harding,
Ernst Weiss, and Christoph Meckel into French. Saenz is an ac¬
claimed professional, who has so far specialized in the really big
names: Grass, Handke, and the recent retranslation into Spanish of
Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.10 Cuniberto is a philosophy lecturer at
the University of Eastern Piedmont, with interests ranging from
Jakob Boehme to Ernst Jiinger, who had previously translated Hans-
Georg Gadamer for Einaudi. It should be obvious that we are deal¬
ing with four different levels of competence in literary translation:
the experienced freelance (Whiteside); the Austrian and avant-
garde specialist (Porcell); the well-established translator of twenti¬
eth-century classics (Saenz); and the relative nonspecialist (Cuni¬
berto).
The Publishers
The American edition (Overlook Press, New Jersey) is the only

translation to have appeared in what might lie described as a
“fringe” outlet. At that time, Overlook Press had no distributor in
Britain, and Dillons Bookshop, which had no difficulty in obtaining
the other translations, was, curiously, unable to get its hands on a
copy of the text in English. Gallimard (Paris) and Einaudi (Milan)
are highly reputable publishing houses, and TusQuets (Barcelona)
is the major Catalonian publisher of non-Catalan literature. Clearly,
the translation of the novel into English, which likes to see itself as
the world’s major language, was less of a publishing event than in

several other European states. At this point it is worth recalling that
while English figures prominently as a source language for literary
translations, it comes very low in any list of target languages.
The Narrator
One of the characteristics of Schneider’s style is his emotionally

excitable narrator, who is frequently driven to expressions of con¬
cern for his subject. Typically, he appears to get worked up, and then
tries to steady himself: “Mit Muhe ermahnen wir unser Herz, ruhig
in der Chronik dieses Lebens fortzufahren. Mit Muhe.”11 [We have
difficulty in calming our hearts enough to continue with the chroni¬
cle of this life. Great difficulty, BS, 67], Whiteside pluralizes the
“heart,” turning the solitary chronicler with his “royal we” into a
collective, and heightening the effect of the second “Mit Muhe” by
making “difficulty” into “Great difficulty.” The heart remains a sin¬
gular in French, but, again, “difficulty” is not simply repeated; the
repetition is enhanced: “Nous avons du mal a calmer notre coeur
en lui enjoignant de poursuivre tranquillement la chronique de
cette vie. Nous avons bien du mal” (FS, 64). The second sentence
loses its breathless quality in the French version; here, it is com¬
pleted syntactically to form a balanced syntactic whole, an improve¬
ment which none of the other translators has undertaken. Spanish
remains most literal: “Con esfuerzo exhortamos a nuestro corazon
a continuar con calma la cronica de esa vida. Con esfuerzo” (HS,
67), but the Italian translator reorganizes the sentence and turns the
calming of the unquiet heart (here perhaps an instance of a roman¬
tic conceit) into a plea for patience: “E ci costa non poca fatica as-
pettare con pazienza che la storia si dispani fino a quel giorno. Non
poca” (VM, 54).
Another passage in which the narrator reveals something of his
approach is when he speaks of Alder’s brother Fritz:
Wir geben ohne Hehl zu, daB er uns nicht interessiert. Fritz war zeitleb-
ens ein so unbedeutender Mensch, daB wir ihn dem Leser am liebsten
iiberhaupt unterschlagen rnochten. Er war von jener Art des vollkom-
men nichtssagenden Zeitgenossen. Und tatsachlich: Aus dem Mund des
Fritz Alder ist uns kein einziges Wort tiberliefert. Ware eines tiberliefert,
es interessierte uns nicht. (SB, 49)
[We shall make no bones about saying that he is of no interest to us. Fritz
was, as long as he lived, so insignificant as to be ignored entirely. Ffe was
one of those people who, in any era, have nothing to say; in fact, not a
single word uttered by Fritz has been handed down to us. And had it
been, it would have been completely uninteresting.] (BS, 49)
The English version copes well with the first sentence, but then goes
into decline; instead of communicating the narrator’s (unrealized)
wish to ignore him, the English text states much more blandly that
Fritz can safely be “ignored entirely,” and the expression nichtssa-
gender Zeitgenosse is rendered literally as “having nothing to say”
rather than as “a complete nonentity.”
Porcell follows the wording of the original closely, but I feel that
he has introduced a slightly ceremonial tone into the second sen¬
tence; and when it comes to the nichtssagender Zeitgenosse, we find
that the relatively simple “nonentity” becomes hyperbolically in¬
flated into “one of those who disappear in their epoch without say¬
ing anything to anyone.” The last sentence, somewhat truncated in
English, is expanded in the French, which incorporates an alliterat¬
ing phrase characteristic of the translator’s partiality to such devices:
Nous ne cherchons pas a dissimuler qu’il ne nous interesse pas. Fritz

resta toute sa vie une personne si insignifiante que nous aurions aime
pouvoir tout simplement le soustraire aux yeux du lecteur. II etait de
l’espece de ceux qui se fondent dans leur epoque et ne disent rien a
personne. Du reste, pas un seul mot de lui n’est effectivement rapporte.
Si c’etait le cas, ce mot-la ne susciterait pas pour autant notre interet.
(FS, 48-49)
In the Spanish, the passage is handled with greater concision, ex¬

cept that the impersonal nichtssagend is treated as personal (“having
absolutely nothing to say to us”):
Reconocemos francamente que no nos interesa. Fritz fue durante toda

su vida una persona tan insignificante, que prefeririamos sustraerselo
por completo al lector. Era de esa clase de contemporaneos que no nos
dicen absolutamente nada. Y efectivamente: de los labios de Fritz Alder
no nos ha llegado una sola palabra. Y si nos hubiera llegado alguna, no
nos interesaria. (HS, 52)
Cuniberto, however, seems to prefer to go his own way by adding

a note of color and transforming the “complete nonentity” into a
“taciturn peasant”:
Non esitiamo a confessare che non ci interessa affatto. Fritz fu per tutta
la vita un personaggio cosi insignificante che faremmo volentieri a meno
di parlarne: apparteneva al genere del contadino muto, e in effetti non
DURRANI: TRANSLATING SCHNEIDER'S SCHLAFES BRUDER 47
potremmo riferire una sola frase che sia mai uscita dalla sua bocca. E se
anche fossimo in grado di farlo dobbiamo ammettere che non ci interes-
serebbe. (VM, 40)
Another linguistic oddity, and one that may well have helped sales
of the novel, is the narrator’s very first sentence, which has been re¬
printed on the covers of successive editions: “Das ist die Geschichte
des Musikers Johannes Elias Alder, der zweiundzwanzigjahrig sein
Leben zu Tode brachte, nachdem er beschlossen hatte, nicht mehr
zu schlafen' (SB, 7). The formulation “sein Leben zu Tode
brachte"' is not a standard expression for suicide, yet in all versions
other than the French, we have a modern, pedestrian-sounding
equivalent: “took his own life” (BS, 1); “mit un terme a ses jours”
(FS, 9); “puso fin a su vida” (HS, 11); “si tolse la vita” (VM, 3). Here,
only Porcell’s preference for the literary flourish pays off.
The Vorarlberg Dialect
It is curious that of the four translators, only Cuniberto provided

an accompanying postscript in which something is said about the
reception of the text by a nonlocal readership. While Austrian,
Swiss, or Bavarian readers will experience the novel as a kind of “re¬
turn to their roots” (un ritorno alle radici), the Italians will first
have to shed some cultural baggage before being able to surrender
themselves to the strangeness of Schneider’s “alpine exoticism”
(VM, 179). Kafka’s translator Willa Muir may argue that “[Austri¬
ans] write a less rigid, less clotted, more supple German which I, for
one, find much easier to translate into good English”12—but this
does not seem to have been the case here. Local words like der Gaden
[a small enclosure] rarely produce anything other than the obvious
(“room,” “chambre,” “habitacion”). Compounds are more diffi¬
cult: compare “Die Gadenzeit,” which is used as the title of a chap¬
ter. “The time in the room” and “Le temps dans la chambre” are
hardly inventive, though “La epoca de la habitacion” shows greater
sensitivity toward the meaning of Zeit in this context as an “age” or
“epoch.” Cuniberto again goes his own way with “La reclusione,”
which avoids rather than solves the problem.
It has been claimed that there are three ways of dealing with dia¬
lect features: to find a comparable dialect in the target language; to
use a conversational variant; or to ignore them altogether.13 Aston¬
ishingly, with very few exceptions our four experts appear united in
their disdain for the first two of these methods, preferring to use
standard language. So, for example “marode”14 (SB, 154) is repro-
duced as “ill, sick” rather than as, say, “poorly”15: “She is ill!” (BS,
146); “Elle est malade!” (FS, 132); “Claro que esta enferma” (HS,
135); “Sta dawero male” (VM, 118). But it is only when we get to
the true regionalisms that have no equivalent outside Vorarlberg,
words like “Funkensonntag” (SB, 19), “Bundt” (SB, 8, passim),
“MaisaB” (SB, 74), “Weiler Hof” (SB, 40), that the translators show
signs of inadequate preparation.
The word Funkensonntag ought not to have presented insuperable
problems since it occurs in the six-volume Duden, which defines it as
follows: “ The first Sunday in Lent, on rohich day it is customary in Swab¬
ian and Alemannic areas (among other practices) to light a log fire on a hill-
tofi’ (D, 2:920).16 Whiteside translates this literally as “Spark Sun¬
day,” which would have been adequate. The effect is marred by a
curiously misleading footnote—the only such addition in the book:
“The first Sunday in Tent, when coal stoves are lit in Germanic
countries” (BS, l7, note). The first Sunday in Lent usually falls in
February, and why the inhabitants of “Germanic” countries, where
it can get quite cold in November, should delay lighting their stoves
until then is not explained. “Coal stoves” are, in any case, inappro¬
priate to a region lacking coal deposits. This mystery is only resolved
by turning to the French translation, where Porcell also glosses his
“dimanche des Etincelles” in similar words: “Premier dimanche du
careme, celebre dans les pays alemaniques par un grand brasier”
(FS, 20).
Whiteside, who has previously translated from the French, follows
Porcell, but misunderstands the gloss twice. He misreads “brasier”
as “large stove, furnace,” and also confuses “alemanique” with “al-
lemand.” This is a blatant example of the misuse of an intermediary,
something which is anathema to the professionals.17 Neither Saenz
nor Cuniberto violates this principle: The Spanish is semantically
misleading (“el domingo de Hogueras,” Sunday of the Bonfires,
sounds more like midsummer, HS, 24); the Italian evades the prob¬
lem (“la prima domenica di quaresima,” VM, 14).
Other words that present problems include “Bundt,” found in
Duden as “Bunt” [enclosed pasture].18 Whiteside converts this into
“mountain passes” (BS, 3); Porcell is more accurate with “paturages
escarpes” (FS, 10); Saenz favors a slightly more poetic-sounding “es-
carpados prados de montana” (HS, 12); Cuniberto employs allitera¬
tion: “rive ripide degli alpeggi” (VM, 4). None of these expressions
has its origin in dialect.
One of the more obscure terms in the novel is “das MaisaB” (SB,
74), although even this word can be found in dictionaries of stan¬
dard German. It appears in Duden in the slightly modified form of
DURRANI: TRANSLATING SCHNEIDER’S SCHLAEES BRUDER 49
“das MaiensaB,” where it is defined as “ Weide, auf die das Vieh im Mai
gebracht wird, bevor es auf die Almen iveiterzieht." [Grazing land, where
the cattle are taken in May, before moving on to the mountain pas¬
tures].15' Not one of the four translators was able to make sense of
this term; quite incongruously and in flagrant violation of its etymol¬
ogy and in ignorance of local agricultural practices, they derived it
not from “Mai’- [May] but from “Mais” [maize]. This then obliges
them to invent a meaning for the ghost word *af. Whiteside has
“ear of maize” (BS, 77); Porcell, similarly, “epi de mais” (FS, 72)—
another instance, possibly, of the French influencing the English
translation. Saenz is no less misinformed: “el ultimo mais” (HS, 75),
and Cuniberto contents himself with a formulation that avoids the
issue altogether and, whether by accident or by design, fits the origi¬
nal reasonably well: “hnche [ . . . ] nei prati non fosse rimasta che
un po’ d’erba bruciacchiata” (VM, 62).
Social Comment
Frequently, allusions are not treated with the care they require.
When Peter, the villain of the piece, is idly sitting by the river, he is
portrayed as touching his intimate parts: “seine Hand fingert am
losen Glied” (SB, 70). The English and French translations com¬
pletely ignore the sexual implications of this act: “his hand fingers
his dangling arm” (BS, 73); “sa main tripote son bras demis” (FS,
69). The Spanish version, by contrast, sounds less innocent: “con la
mano se manoesa el flaccido miembro” (FtS, 72), although, oddly,
the “loose” member has become “flabby” or “flaccid.” But in Ital¬
ian, the incident is more sharply focused: here the boy is “bored”
and entertains himself by playing with his uncovered member: “tras-
tullandosi annoiato con il membro scoperto” (VM, 59). This transla¬
tion is more explicit than any of the others and effectively more so
than the original.
When it comes to passing social comment, the translators have to
select a register which they consider appropriate. “Plappermaul”
[malicious chatterbox, passim] is a typical instance of a (complex)
label that draws attention to underlying malice. It is somewhat inad¬
equately rendered as “gossip” in English; the Spanish “charlatan” is
closer; French and Italian cope well, albeit with the help of extensive
idioms rather than with a single apt phrase: “les bavardages d’une
mauvaise langue Alder”; “comare Alder—la lingua piu lunga di
Eschberg.” The derisive “Brotmauler” (SB, 172) is similarly weak¬
ened in the English “bread-filled mouths” (BS, 183); French “leurs
joues encore encombrees de tartines” (FS, 162); and Italian “la
bocca ancora piena di pane” (VM, 147). Spanish at least manages a

slang expression for “mouths”:' “sus jetas, todavia masticando” (HS.,
168). Here we also note that English and Italian refer to “bread,”
French to “tartines”—closer to “sandwiches”—and Spanish merely
to the act of chewing. The context had specified what was on the
bread:
Andere . . . packten Wurst- und Selleriebrote aus ihren Taschen und

stopften die Wegzehrung pietatlos in ihre Mauler. Die Damen hoheren
Standes aber schnabelten gelangweilt an saftig-siiBen Erdbeeren. (SB,
170)
This becomes:
Others . . . unwrapped sausage and celery sandwiches and stuffed their

provisions irreverently into their mouths. But the upper-class ladies nib¬
bled boredly on sweet juicy strawberries. (BS, 180-81)
This appears satisfactory, apart from the casual-sounding adverbial

formation “boredly,” which I take to be a typical “loan transla¬
tion.”20 Porcell turns “irreverently” into the rather turgid “in defi¬
ance of the most elementary piety,” thereby overstating its effect:
D’autres ... deballerent des tartines au saucisson et au celeri et les ingur-

giterent au mepris de la plus elementaire piete. Les dames de condition,
quant a elles, grignotaient d’un air las des fraises sucrees et juteuses. (FS,
160)
In the Spanish, “piety” has yielded to “pity”:
Otros . . . sacaron panes con salchicha y apio y se llenaron la boca sin

compasion con sus provisiones de viaje. Las damas de clases mas alta, en
cambio, mordisquearon aburridas fresas jugosas y dulces. (HS, 166)
In Italian, it turns into “restraint”:
Altri. . . estrassero dalle loro borse pani, salame e sedano e si abuffarono

senza ritegno con le prowiste per il viaggio di ritorno. Mentre le dame
di rango piluccavano annoiate qualche succosa dolce fragola. (VM,
145-46)
In the latter, we also observe that the “provisions” have become

“provisions for the return journey.”
It has been noted that much of the text reveals the limited speech
of the rural populace of Eschberg and their inability to communi¬

cate among themselves.21 Occasional scraps of dog-Latin bear this
out. For example, when the villagers wish to emphasize a point, they
add the macaronic phrase: “Siket erat et prinzipus in nunk und sem¬
per” (SB, 64, passim). This is retained in English and Spanish, ex¬
cept for “und” which rightly becomes “and” (compare BS, 66, HS,
67). In French, we find two further changes, designed to achieve ap¬
proximations to the (German?) pronunciation of Latin: “Sicot erat
et principus in nuc at semper” (FS, 63). Cuniberto, however, is
moved to normalize the Latin orthography, while still leaving the
meaning obscure: “Sic erat et principius in nunc et semper” (VM,
54).
The primitive responses of the populace are brought out in a vari¬
ety of ways, especially in references to superstitions and to commu¬
nal acts of violence. Noises made in such contexts often rely on an
element of onomatopoeia, for example, in the phrase “Unter
Lachen und Johlen durchsetzt vom Rosenkranzgesausel der
Weiber” (SB, 20); the compound “Rosenkranzgesausel” presents a
typical challenge to the translator. “Muttering” falls somewhat
short, as in: “Amid laughter and shouts, mingling with the women’s
muttered rosaries” (BS, 19); the French “bourdonnement” (a kind
of “buzzing” sound) fits better, although “Johlen” is misread as
“shouts of joy”: “Au milieu des rires et des cris de joie meles au
bourdonnement du rosaire que recitaient les femmes” (FS, 22). The
Spanish loses in color but gains in accuracy; and “voces” is surely
too bland for “Johlen”: “Entre risas y voces mezcladas con mur-
mullo de rosarios de las mujeres” (HS, 25). Italian comes up with a
better rendering for “Johlen” (“schiamazzi”), but fails altogether to
reproduce the mumbling incantation of the rosaries, which merely
become the “background” to the men’s shouting: “Tra risa e schia¬
mazzi, a cui facevano da sfondo i rosari delle donne” (VM, 16). An¬
other important point is that not one of the translators could find a
fitting expression for “Weiber,” the narrator’s standard, rather dis¬
missive reference to “women,” implying disrespect (“womenfolk”).
The Final Chapter
Welch prachtvolle Menschen—kommt uns der Gedanke wieder—mu6

die Welt verloren haben, nur weil es ihnen nicht gegonnt war, ihr Leben
im GleichmaB von Gluck und Ungluck zu leben. (SB, 196)
[What glorious people—the idea comes to us again—must the world

have lost simply because it was not granted them to live their life in a
balance of happiness and unhappiness.] (BS, 207)
Quels etres magnifiques—songeons-nous a nouveau—le monde n’a-t-il

pas perdus pour la seule raison qu’il ne leur fut pas donne de vivre une
vie d’equilibre entre le bonheur et le malheur! (FS, 183)
“Que hombre tan magnifico,” volvemos a pensar, “tuvo que perder el

mundo, solo porque no se permitio vivir su vida en equilibrio entre la
felicidad y la infelicidad.” (HS, 190)
E ci ritorna assillante il pensiero: quanti uomini eccelsi il mondo avra

perduto solo perche non fu loro concessa una vita piu serena, un piu
giusto equilibrio di pena e felicita. (VM, 167)
It proves surprisingly difficult to translate the word “Menschen”

[human beings]. English uses “people,” which sounds pedestrian;
French somewhat dehumanizes the “beings,” while the (“macho-”?)
languages Spanish and Italian are gender specific in their male ori¬
entation. Italian has again gone its own way and added “a more se¬
rene life,” and turned “unhappiness” into “pain.”
The final paragraph produces some further interesting diver¬
gences:
Die Kinder blickten sie mit runden, braunen Augen an. Da trat Cosmas,
der Alteste, zur Mutter hin und frug sie mit verstellt erwachsener
Stimme: “Frau Mutter, was meint Liebe?” (SB, 202)
[The children looked at her with round brown eyes. Then Cosmas, the
eldest, went to his mother and, affecting an adult voice, he asked,
“Mother dear, what does love mean?”] (BS, 215)
Various archaic features fail to surface in the English; the obsolete/

regional “frug” and “meint” have no equivalents, and “went to his
mother” is less remarkable than “trat zur Mutter hin.” “Mother
dear” is perhaps more cozy than the distancing “Frau Mutter,” al¬
though both have an archaic ring. In French, we note a tendency to
translate proper names:
Les enfants la regardaient avec de grands yeux bruns. Alors Come,

l’aine, s’avanya vers sa mere et demanda en affectant une voix d’adulte:
“Mere, qu’est-ce que cela veut dire, amour?” (FS, 189)
Saenz confuses “sie” and “sich” in this passage, and makes the chil¬
dren look at each other rather than at their mother. “Was meint” is
lost altogether:
Los ninos se miraron con ojos redondos y castanos. Entonces Cosmas, el

mayor, fue a su madre y le pregunto, con forzada voz de adulto:
—Madre, ^que es el amor? (HS, 196)
Cuniberto produces major dislocations, converting the children’s

“round, brown” eyes into “eyes opened wide in wonder.” The cru¬
cial word “mother” is dropped completely:
I bambini la guardarono con gli occhi sgranati dalla meraviglia. Poi Cos-
mas, il primogenito, le si awicind e le chiese, dandosi arie da adulto:
—Che cosa vuol dire amore? (VM, 173)
The Ethics of Difference
The comparisons made above allow us to formulate a few general

comments on the contrasting strategies used by the four translators.
These derive from a number of distinct factors: the structure of the
target language, the level of the translator’s linguistic ability, and a
wider cultural perception of the translator’s role, which determines
how s/he approaches the task of translating, irrespective of the level
of her or his own linguistic competence.
Whiteside translates into a target language that has few dialects
which function as proven vehicles for literature; his readership is
likely to be drawn largely from disparate urban circles on both sides
of the Atlantic. His linguistic inventiveness is limited. He frequently
opts for bland phrases, such as “unusually tender” for “ungemein
zartlich,” where “infinitely tender” would have been closer (BS,
154, SB, 146), and “curious” for “befremdlich” [mysterious] (BS,
75, SB, 72). Frequent misunderstandings occur even at basic level:
the “sperrige[n] Lederschuhe[n]” (SB, 32) become “tight” rather
than “bulky” or “cumbersome” leather shoes (BS, 31). Some tricky
sentences are omitted altogether: “Und abermals uberschrien sie
ihr zitterndes Gewissen” (SB, 86), and similar looking words are
confused, presumably in error, as when “Kopf ” [head] mutates into
“hand” (SB, 139, BS, 146). There may be cultural reasons for trans¬
lating “Amsel” [blackbird, BS, 63] as “thrush.” As noted above,
Whitehead turned to the French version on a few occasions. His
translation is at best workmanlike, at worst sloppy; subtleties and ele¬
gance of diction are not its strong points.
Porcell has approached the text from a very different angle. Preci¬
sion and neat, euphonic formulations are not necessarily compati¬
ble goals, and it seems that, when torn between the two, Porcell in¬
clines toward the latter. His translation is the most polished, even
when this is achieved at the expense of a loss of equivalence of regis¬

ter. His relentless pursuit of the mot juste leads to inaccurate nu¬
ances when handling the more rough-cut, rustic-sounding passages.
There is an urbane quality about this version which privileges estab¬
lished literary devices and shuns the cruder aspects of the original.
It could be that an educated French readership has always preferred
translations that sound elegant, whereas a British readership almost
expects translated prose to sound alien. In his provocative dialogue
on the rivalry of languages (1798), August Wilhelm Schlegel, re¬
flecting on cross-cultural attitudes, comments on the French ten¬
dency to welcome only those foreign guests who were clad as they
themselves were: “In our opinion a foreign author resembles a
stranger in our midst, who is obliged to dress and behave like the
rest of us if he wishes to find favour.”22 And yet even here there are
occasional signs of carelessness, for example, in the alternation of
“Goetzberg” and “Gotzberg.”
Saenz has certainly brought his extensive experience as a transla¬
tor of recondite German to bear on Schlafes Bruder. Yet here, too,
there is a lack of the rustic, homely quality of certain passages in
the original. One might have expected a more narrowly localized
vocabulary, a Catalan or Andalusian turn of phrase, but as far as I
can judge, this was not attempted.
There is an Italian proverb in which the translator is branded a
traducer (a pun on traduttore and traditore) ,23 of which Cuniberto at
first sight appears to be living proof. Although he is the only one
of the group to have added his own metatextual commentary, he
reorganizes his material to a greater extent than any of the others
did, rewriting entire passages and going his own way whenever there
is a chance to do so. We get an early indication of this in the title.
In the first Italian edition, Cuniberto even rewrote the dedication,
deleting the “e” at the end of Pascale, creating the impression that
Schneider had dedicated the book to the French philosopher rather
than to a young lady of his acquaintance, an erroneous assumption
repeated by some of the book’s early reviewers.24 In common with
Whiteside, Cuniberto tones down authorial comments, such as “daB
Gott dort den Menschen nie gewollt hatte” (SB, 74), which acquires
a very different flavor as: “che quel luogo era maledetto da Dio”
(VM, 62). However, it is not “language” but “meaning” that is being
transferred,25 and there are times when Cuniberto’s transformations
and apparent distortions must be recognized as examples of a
thoughtful and creative approach to his work. This translator may
have “cannibalized” his source, but not so much in the sense of mu¬
tilation and devouring as in the sense of an invigorating, productive
absorption.2b Several authorities concur with Douglas Robinson’s

claim that it is now “the translator’s turn”; that the erstwhile oblig¬
ing, but ultimately faceless handmaiden of the writer must engage
dialogically both with the original text and with the ethics of the re¬
ceptor.27 All translations are mediated by the cultural values of the
target language, and this has led to a call for a more strongly individ¬
ualistic and creative approach among literary interpreters.28 What is
sacrificed is the willingness, encouraged by George Steiner and oth¬
ers, to allow the target language to be transformed and enriched
by this encounter with the foreign tongue.29 For current theories of
liberation and empowerment demand that literary translations
should not read like originals;30 wooden-sounding literalisms may, in
this view, be preferable to painstakingly polished prose for which
Porcell and, to a lesser extent, Saenz, have opted. However, I would
find it very difficult to support my own view that the most successful
translation is the one that displays the most obvious signs of being a
translation, unless the gain in immediacy could be demonstrated to
outweigh the loss in fluency. A sure sign of Cuniberto’s linguistic
achievement is the fact that the novel seems to have won more prizes
in Italy than elsewhere.31 This fact alone is evidence that the judges,
who, one can assume, reflect the Italian reading public’s likes and
dislikes, were swayed in their assessments by the approximation to
their own patterns of speech and thought, not, as I have argued else¬
where, by a version which advertises itself as a translation.32
The object of this inquiry was not to award points for the best at¬
tempts, but rather to try to discover whether Europe’s translators are
working within a common set of parameters. It is obvious that they
are not, and it is right that it should be so. The horror Schneider
conveys at the brutishness of rural life—a specifically Austrian expe¬
rience, replicated in the work of many other novelists from Felder
to Innerhofer, Bernhard, and Handke—relies on the language that
Schneider himself has used, and each translator must fail when it
comes to reproducing this in the manner of the author. But if they
have failed, they have, as this study has shown, done so in different
ways characteristic of themselves and of the expectations of their tar¬
get readership. A comparison of their versions alerts us to the range
of strategies available to the translators “groping towards each other
in a common mist,”33 as well as to some of the pitfalls of which they
became victims. More importantly, though, it has confirmed the
unique aspects of the original and directed attention toward the
ethos of the culture from which this novel emerged and which it
reflects.
Notes
1. See Theo Hermans, The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literaly Translation (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), passim.
2. See Ulrich Greiner, “Tanz der Vampire,” Die Zeit 18 (1998): 41 f.
3. For background information on the text, see Rainer Moritz, Uber “Schlafes Bruder”: Mate-
rialien zu Robert Schneiders Roman (Leipzig: Reclam, 1996); for material on the film, see Joseph
Vilsmaier, “Schlafes Bruder”: Der Film (Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1995).
4. The Guardian Weekend, 18 April 1998, 5.
5. The title presupposes knowledge of the conceit that Sleep is the brother of Death,
which occurs in earliest literature; see The Iliad 14. 195.
6. Some of the foreign hardback versions have different cover illustrations, including pic¬
tures of Anker’s Torso of a Boy.
7. Vor allem aber verfugt seine Sprache uber verwirrende Kraft und zuweilen atemberau-
bende Eleganz. Satzbau und Wortwahl streben zuruck ins 19. Jahrhundert—und sind den-
noch von Modernismen durchsetzt. Eben noch bedient sich der Autor der Vorarlberger
Mundart, da sturzt schon eine Kaskade von Fremdwortern durch den nachsten Absatz. See
Martin Doerry, ‘‘Ein Splittern von Knochen,” Der Spiegel, 23 November 1992, 256 f.
8. Thomas Rietzschel, “Das Dorf ist die Holle des Kiinstlers. Wehe dem, der auf dem
Lande hleibt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 September 1992, 15; Beatrice von Matt, “Fohn-
stiirme und Klangwetter,” Neue Ziircher Zeitung, 20 October 1992, 23.
9. Marcel Schneider, “Un conte de la folie exemplaire,” LeFigaro, 8 April 1994, speaks of
baroque features; Simona Maccari, writing in II Manifesto, 23 June 1994, detects postmodern
and neoromantic influences. See Ursula Edinger, “Schlafes Bruder in der Kritik des Auslan-
des,” in Moritz, Uber “Schlafes Bruder,” 123-38.
10. See Anke Detken, Doblins “Berlin Alexanderplatz" iibersetzt (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &
Rupprecht, 1997), 17 and passim.
11. Robert Schneider, Schlafes Bruder (Leipzig: Reclam, 1992), 65. Hereafter SB, cited in the
text. The editions to be compared are abbreviated as follows: BS\ Brother of Sleep, trans. Shaun
Whiteside (New York: Overlook Press, 1995); FS: Frere sommeil, trans. Claude Porcell (Paris:
Livre de Poche, 1994); HS: Hermann del sueho, trans. Miguel Saenz (Barcelona: TusQuets,
1994); VM: Le voci del mondo, trans. Flavio Cuniberto (Torino: Einaudi, 1994).
12. Edwin and Willa Muir, “Translating from the German,” in Reuben A. Brower, On Trans¬
lation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 96.
13. See David Horton, “Non-standard language in translation: Roddy goes to Germany,”
German Life and Letters 51 (1998): 418.
14. See Duden: Das grofie Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache in seeks Banden, 6 vols. (Mannheim:
Bibliographisches Institut, 1976), 4:1741, where “marode” is marked “dsterreichiche Umgangs-
sprache.” Hereafter D, cited in the text.
15. On a previous occasion, “marode” had been reproduced as “poorly”; see Brother of
Sleep, 41.
16. Erster Fastensonntag, an dem im schwabisch-alemannischen Raum (neben anderen Brauchen)
auf einer Anhohe ein HolzstoJ] entzundet wird\ my translation.
17. See Horst Turk, “Probleme der Ubersetzungsanalyse und der Ubersetzungstheorie,”
Jahrbuch fur Internationale Germanistik 21, no. 2 (1989): 8-155, who evokes “den Grundsatz des
direkten Kontakts zwischen Ausgangs- und Zielsprache” (15).
18. Eingezauntes Stuck Land,” in Duden, 1:447.
19. Duden, 4:1721.
20. Peter Newmark, Approaches to Translation (Oxford: Pergamon, 1988), 84 f., identifies
this type of “through-translation” as typical of translations of pamphlets and brochures.
21. See Osman Durrani, “Non-verbal Communication in Robert Schneider’s Novel Schlafes
Bruder," in Arthur Williams, Stuart Parkes, and Julian Preece, eds., Contemporary German Writ¬
ers: Their Aesthetics and Their Language (Bern: Lang, 1996), 223-36.
22. Wir betrachten einen auslandischen Schriftsteller wie einen Fremden in der Gesell-
schaft, der sich nach unserer Sitte kleiden und betragen muB, wenn er gefallen soil. August
Wilhelm Schlegel, “Der Wettstreit der Sprachen,” in Edgar Lohner, ed., August Wilhelm Sch-
legel: Kritische Schriften und Briefe. I: Sprache und Poetik (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1962), 252.
23. For this “untranslatable” pun, see Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Transla¬
tion,” in Brower, On Translation, 238.
24. Edinger, “Schlafes Bruderin der Kritik des Auslandes,” 135.
25. “Nicht die Sprache als solche kann verdolmetscht, sondern nur der Sinn einer AuBer-
ung kann ubertragen werden.” See Danica Seleskovitch, “Zur Theorie des Dolmetschens,”
in Volker Kapp, ed., Ubersetzer und Dolmetscher (Tubingen: Francke, 1991), 38.
26. For the application of this term by the Brazilian da Campos brothers, see Edwin Charles
Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories (London: Roudedge, 1993), 192.
27. Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1991).
28. Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories, 182 f.; Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of
Translation (New York: Roudedge, 1998), 6.
29. "The translator enriches his tongue by allowing the source language to penetrate and
modify it.” See George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3d ed. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 67.
30. An opinion voiced by Walter Benjamin, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Vladimir Nabokov, and
many others; see Fritz Giittinger, Zielsprache: Theorie und Technik des Ubersetzens (Zurich: Ma-
nesse, 1963), 8; Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories, 194; Venuti, Scandals of Translation,
passim.
31. Premio del Libro di Montagna, Premio Grinzane Cavour; see Moritz, Uber “Schlafes
Bruder, ” 189.
32. Methods recommended in Scandals of Translation (14-16) include the use of British
English when writing for an American audience, or the choice of “Gothic” formulations.
33. Steiner, After Babel, 65.
Translating Myth:
The Task of Speaking Time and Space
Jill Scott
Queen’s University
To hear significance is to translate.

—George Steiner
A text lives on only if it is at once

translatable and untranslatable.
—-Jacques Derrida
M YTH is a mode of communicadon, which is by its very nature

always already a translation. These primeval texts of human¬
ity reach both backwards and forwards from and into diverse cul¬
tural narratives, illustrating social identities and complex configura¬
tions of community. Myth is not translation in the strictest sense,
that is, the rendering of a text from one language to another.1
Rather, its function is to bridge one spaciotemporal context to an¬
other and to grant continued and renewed significance to a time-
tested cultural narrative. In Walter Benjamin’s theory of criticism,
the task of the critic is not to describe the work of art within its own
time, but to describe his time within the context of the work of art.
So it is with myth as with Benjamin’s work of art—the translation
from one epoch to another involves letting myth speak a people and
a time.
The purpose of this essay is twofold. First, it will examine the inter¬
relations of mythopoesis and translation, whereby mythopoesis is de¬
fined as the creative means by which myth achieves its translation to
new times and spaces.2 I will argue that myth and translation share
many fundamental debates such as the problem of originality and
authenticity, the role of the foreign and the familiar, and the lasting
nature of the text. Second, taking specific examples from the Greek
myth of Electra in adaptations by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, and Ezra Pound, I will present the case that Attic tra-
58
SCOTT: TRANSLATING MYTH 59
gedians and modern dramatists alike use mythopoesis to demystify

myth and to undo the “myth of origin.”
Translation simultaneously refers to and denies the authority of
origin, and myth shares this same paradox. Myth is often viewed as
a suspicious misrepresentation of the truth, a belief echoed in Max
Muller’s famous dictum: “Myth is a disease of language.”3 Yet myth
is also often laden with the powerful truth-value that comes from its
mystical, supernatural elements and its inherent associations with
the origins of all literature and culture. Like translation, myth is
haunted by the “myth of origin.” Mythopoesis in turn denies this
privileging of origin. All mythopoesis can be seen as an attempt on
the part of myth to transcend its own roots through translation.
“A good translation is like a pane of glass,” writes Norman Sha¬
piro, “you notice that it’s there when there are little imperfec¬
tions.”4 This view of translation as faithful servant to an authentic
original advocates the highest degree of fluency and transparency in
the target language. However, it contradicts the project of my¬
thopoesis, which seeks to incorporate new social configurations into
the larger story of humanity. In The Translator’s Invisibility Lawrence
Venuti calls this obsession with transparency a blindness to the im¬
portant ideological and political aspects of translation. Transpar¬
ency is perhaps a form of blindness, but it is also a form of silenc¬
ing—translations must speak their differences as a sign of the other,
the previously unknown. The question of whether to translate allow¬
ing the foreignness of the original language to permeate the new
text or to assimilate cultural as well as linguistic difference is central
to debates in translation theory. The flavor of the arguments may be
contemporary, taking into account the concerns raised by postcolo¬
nialism and theories of alterity; however the debates are as old as the
notion of translation itself.
The practice of translation has been haunted by the shadow of
taboo and prohibition, from the question of how and whether to
translate Homer to the controversy surrounding the translation of
sacred texts into the vernacular, to the philosophical postulations of
the German Romantics and the cultivation of a national spirit
through language. But before we pursue any of these aspects in
depth, let us begin with a consideration of what we understand to be
a translation. Cultural critic and literary historican, George Steiner,
permits himself the provocative statement that “translation is for¬
mally and pragmatically implicit in every act of communication, in
the emission and reception of each and every mode of meaning, be
it in the widest semiotic sense or in more specifically verbal ex¬
changes. To hear significance,” claims Steiner, “is to translate.”5
While this declaration may seem radical, it has deep historical roots.
Steiner echoes the sentiments of the German Romantics, specifically
Wilhelm von Humboldt, who postulated that “all understanding . . .
is always at the same time a misunderstanding,” making translation
an inevitable act of everyday cognitive processes.6 And for Benjamin,
too, translation can never be divorced from all thinking about lan¬
guage. In “Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers” (The task of the transla¬
tor), he maintains that the original is always already a translation of
what he calls “pure language” and that translation can only ever be
judged in accordance with the relative relationship of both texts to
that distant pure language. He defines translation as taking the
nameless purity of language and giving it a name in the language of
man. Yet this pure language is also revealed and rescued through
the interaction of the original and the translation. For Benjamin,
“the essence [of a translation] is not the message, not the communi¬
cation,” but rather the afterlife (“das Uberleben, das Fortleben”) of
the work.7 Indeed, the act of translation enriches and gives new life
to the original, saving it from oblivion and even transforming the
language of the source text in the process. Agreeing with Steiner,
Benjamin sees language itself as a translation, the production of sim¬
ilarity through the great human mimetic faculty.8 All of these critics
have in common that they view translation as the production of a
text with its own validity and not the rendering of an inferior copy
or double.
Just as there are countless taboos regarding translation, so too are
there significant cultural prohibitions surrounding myth. The word
myth comes from the Greek muthos, meaning “a traditional story, ei¬
ther wholly or partially fictitious, providing an explanation for or
embodying a popular idea concerning some natural or social phe¬
nomenon or some religious belief or ritual” (O.E.D.). Myth, then, is
simultaneously a false, untrustworthy medium and a story carrying
profound human truths. Inherent in myth is the association with the
“origins” of all literature and culture, and both Freudian and Jung-
ian psychology interpret myth as the collective unconscious, the psy¬
chic roots of humanity itself. It is the trip home we think we are tak¬
ing in myth that is the key to its prestige. But this trip “home” to
some imagined origin is also the source of controversy and concern.
This link between myth and origin or authenticity is an important
one, for myth makes no pretense of having humble beginnings. The
root holds all the clout. And for Steiner, this origin is tied to that of
language, as he argues in his analysis of myth: “The principle Greek
myths are imprinted in our language and on our grammars in par¬
ticular . .. We speak the vestiges of myth when we speak.”9 Moreover,
he maintains, “language and myth develop reciprocally.”10 Follow¬

ing Steiner’s logic, if translation is already an integral component in
every act of communicadon, we can conclude that speaking myth in
language is akin to transladon itself. Steiner is not alone, however,
in postulating the close ties between linguistic structures and those
present in myth.
The German Romantics with their program of Neue Mythologie ad¬
vocated the regeneradon of myth in language as the key to mythic
transcendence in a dialectical relationship with nature and the
human spirit. Thus myth becomes a kind of “tautegorical” absolute,
to use Freidrich Schelling’s terms, neither allegorical nor euhemer-
istic, but autonomous and devoid of all secondary meaning.11 In this
sense, the Romantics' understanding of myth is the direct opposite
of their views on translation, which assumes human mediation.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, one of the greatest enthusiasts of transla¬
don as an integral element in the German national cultural agenda,
was adamant that translations not have an assimilating effect. They
should bear the residue of their foreign nature so as not to “contam¬
inate” the newly formed German language and culture with textual
imposters. For Schleiermacher, Greek myth is not alien to the Ger¬
man cultural agenda; on the contrary, Greek civilization and lan¬
guage are for him the very etymology of the German language. But
translations of myth should nevertheless reflect the historical and
geographic distance of these ancient tales.
Indeed, Schleiermacher and Venuti come to the same conclusion
that translation should not be a transparent reproduction of an orig¬
inal, albeit with different arguments. Venuti’s reasoning is a political
and ideological commitment to avoiding what he calls the “ethno¬
centric violence of translation.”12 Schleiermacher’s convictions are
equally rooted in a cultural agenda, though one which seeks to keep
the foreign apart and different, avoiding assimilation into a pristine
German national literature. For Douglas Robinson, however, the im¬
petus behind foreignizing the text is always more complicated than
an external social contract. He brings it down to the fact that both
the self and the other are always inherent within the original foreign
text, what he calls the doubled soul. Robinson postulates that the
forces surrounding translation are charged with the emotion of re¬
ducing the otherness in the self to “the same brown faceless deper¬
sonalized sludge that passes for ‘literature’ or ‘culture’ in every part
of this debased society.”13 Transparency of translation, he con¬
cludes, threatens the integrity of the individual. Robinson also takes
exception with Benjamin’s theory of translation and accuses him of
having taken language prisoner. He argues that Benjamin’s favoring
of pure language is elitist and contradictory to his critique of myth.14

Somewhat sarcastically, Robinson suggests that the real task of the
translator should be to free pure language from its magical spell. In
Benjamin’s defense, however, it should be noted that his writings on
the philosophy of language date from an early period and that his
critique of myth comes out of his later arcades project influenced by
the historical materialist approach of the Frankfurt School.15
Much of the work on mythology in recent decades has been part
of a project initiated by the Frankfurt School to eradicate the kind
of powerful phantasmagoric quality of myth appropriated by the Na¬
tional Socialists in Germany. This is the impetus behind Benjamin’s
denigration of myth as “dream-kitsch,” the kind of paralytic catato¬
nia brought on by the mesmerizing images of capitalist consumer
society.16 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer dedicate their work
in The Dialectic of Enlightenment to waking up the public, shaking them
out of the complacent slumber of myth. In their exhaustive social
analysis, mass consumer culture becomes fertile territory for manipu¬
lating public opinion with powerful and dangerous totalitarian
myths. For them, there is a direct link between myth and fascism.17
The one thing all mythographers seem to agree upon is that myth
carries with it a discreet power, at once embodying creative energies
and along with it the dangers of the misappropriation of the spirit.
The critique of myth begins long before modern times, however.
It has been argued that literature since Homer has been nothing
other than an attempt to free humanity from the dark chthonian
underworld of myth. The mystic, ritualistic, nonrational aspect of
myth is targeted for elimination. Plato is among the first to warn of
the dangers of myth, the seductive side that threatens to implode in
its own fiction. He views myth as lacking authenticity because of its
transmission from oral culture, carrying no more truth-value than
rumor itself.18 Plato is the first to distinguish between the two words
muthos and logos, which had previously been used interchangeably to
mean both “speech” and “word.”19 The original semantic affinity
of these two lexical roots of “mytho/logy” (the former meaning
“fictional narrative account” and the latter meaning “reason” or
“logic”) accounts for the extreme dichotomy in our cultural under¬
standing of myth as both an exaggerated story and an absolute tran¬
scendental ideal.
Like Plato, the German Romantics turned to language to make
their case for a new mythology. In “The Origin of Language”
(1772), Johann Gottfried Herder denies the commonly held view
that language is either divinely bestowed on man or merely con¬
trived, instead proposing that through language humans do not imi-
tate nature but divine creativity itself.20 Herder does not view mythol¬
ogy as a static medium but as a “New Mythology,” which can be lived
and revitalized in the form of poetic works. Goethe’s conception of
mythology closely follows that of Herder, and also holds that origin
does not exist as an outside concept, but rather that it is revealed in
the process of literary transposition of myth. Along with Karl Philipp
Moritz, Goethe’s mythopoetics rests on the distinction between alle¬
gory, for him a one-dimensional mode of reference, and symbol, a
mode of truth, which cannot be reduced or referred to outside of
itself or “general ideas given from nature.”21 Thus the simultaneous
autonomy and polysemicity of the symbol provide the means of ex¬
pression necessary for the wild energy of myth to surge forth, as illus¬
trated for example in Goethe’s poem “Prometheus.”
Mythopoesis seeks to harness this “wild energy” of myth, to trans¬
late and transpose it onto a new context in a careful balancing act
between origin and invention. It maps its past and its future in the
creation of a new text. A case in point is Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which
tells the story of Agamemnon’s homecoming from the Trojan war,
where a trap awaits him and his concubine, Cassandra. The scarlet
tapestry of honor is exchanged for the sordid red of a bloody bath,
where the war hero meets his end at the hands of his wife, Clytem-
nestra, and her lover-accomplice, Aegisthus. Electra must wait pa¬
tiently for her brother, Orestes, to return from exile and revenge
their father’s death through matricide. In his rendering of the myth,
Aeschylus departs from Homer to portray the struggle to free hu¬
manity from the hold of the gods in a shift away from supernatural
forces to the powers of reason. The Attic tragedian carries the an¬
cient world from darkness to light and celebrates progress through
the “civic marriage of men and gods.”22
The mythopoesis at work in the Oresteia creates a humanist trag¬
edy out of myth, separating it from its barbaric past. By the end of
the trilogy, Athena has laid down the preliminary structures for a
court of law, where justice prevails over the fancy of Zeus and his
entourage. In the Eumenides, Orestes is acquitted for his crime, but
Athena never declares his innocence. Instead, she justifies her deci¬
sion by privileging civil institutions over divine law: “I honour the
male, in all things but marriage . . . / Even if the vote is equal, Ores¬
tes wins.”23 Athena places the union of man and woman above the
blood relations of mother and child, while Apollo argues that
woman is merely a vessel for the man’s seed. Civic, state law tri¬
umphs over the rule of the Olympian gods and the mythical powers
of the earth. In this new world order, it would appear that logos as¬
cends as muthos is defeated. But in the larger project of translating
myth, we find that the mysterious powers of myth cannot be re¬

pressed. The strangeness of the other continues to haunt these sto¬
ries in spite of or perhaps because of their translation to new times
and spaces.-4
The humanism apparent in this ascendance from myth to tragedy
is found in both Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electra tragedies, where
the resolution that is sought has greater ramifications than the mere
culmination of the Apollonian oracle and revenging of Agamem¬
non’s unjust murder. On the contrary, the conclusion of the Sopho-
clean tragedy, which portrays neither Orestes nor his sister Electra
as remorseful for their actions, shows the siblings liberated from the
grip of the evil curse that had plagued their family for generations.
The last lines of the chorus justify the brutal murders and laud
brother and sister alike:
Children of Atreus, from great suffering

You have won freedom at last
By what has been done here, today.25
Human reason again triumphs over the mystic powers of myth. Iron¬
ically, however, while tragedy can be seen to purify myth of its chtho-
nian roots, it also harkens back to its own muthos, the language that
speaks the narrative of humanity.
Mythopoesis, as the translation of myth, can be seen as a dialec¬
tical struggle between the foreign and the familiar. Myth is the trans¬
lation derived from a source text, already a translation; it has no
original or final copy. Rather it is in a constant state of flux and tran¬
sition. Certainly Homer is not the author of his epic tales—we only
name him this for lack of earlier extant versions of these narratives.
Even the so-called Urtexts of Western civilization, the Iliad and the
Odyssey are in fact translations from oral culture.
Like the translation, then, the tragic text of mythopoesis is always
at least doubled. Humboldt claims that we all find ourselves in a
doubled relationship to language by virtue of the fact that all under¬
standing is a misunderstanding, and that the concept has no sign
save for an ideal imaginary one. Schleiermacher, too, adopted the
notion of translation as “going doubled like a ghost” (where ghost
implies the German Geist—ghost, intellect or spirit in the larger
sense). Robinson interprets Schleiermacher’s words as an indication
of the magical otherness of translation, the double that it conjures
up inside each of us, either reader or translator: “A ghost or a dou¬
ble that translates, traps supernatural reflections and projections in
a prison house or a paradise of language.”26 This magic of the ghost
is not a replacement for the original text, nor does it belong to the
category of replica or copy, but is a residual extra. In other words,
there is no loss when it comes to translation. Jacques Derrida con¬
firms this when he states that “ Ubersetzungand translation overcome,
equivocally in the course of an equivocal combat, the loss of the ob¬
ject. A text lives on only if it is at once translatable and untranslat¬
able.”27 The retention of the German Ubersetzung aptly illustrates this
doubled nature, which semantically alleviates the mourning of the
lost object. The implication here is that the otherness of the double,
like the foreignness in a translation, is the key to the survival of the
text as such.
The concept of the stranger in the translation as the agent of res¬
cue can be equally applied to mythopoesis. Hofmannsthal’s 1903
version of Sophocles’ Electro inserts a strangeness of psychic and
erotic tensions into his text, thereby saving it for a new era. Once
the boy-genius of the Viennese coffee house literary scene, Hof¬
mannsthal wrote one of the most influential dramas of the Electra
myth since the Attic tragedies. Entitled Elektra: Tragodie in einem Auf-
zugfrei nach Sophokles, this one-act play is more of an adaptation than
a translation.28 By his own admission, Hofmannsthal’s classical edu¬
cation was somewhat irregular, although his erudition with regard to
the classics of European literature is legendary. He read the Greek
tragedies in the original, but he probably knew them better through
contemporary commentaries.29 Hofmannsthal likely used Georg
Thudichum’s 1838 translation of Sophocles’ Electra as a guide, from
which he took words and phrases for his new version.30 The poetry
of this new Elektra is breathtakingly beautiful despite the violence
and brutality of the action. But fidelity to the Greek is not Hof¬
mannsthal’s priority—dramatic innovation is his motive.
Composed at the height of the tumultuous hn-de-siecle period,
Elektra introduces several strikingly daring innovations. Unlike in
the Greek tragedies, the heroine’s role here is not eclipsed by the
shocking matricide committed by Orestes. In fact, Electra upstages
her brother’s actions by performing an ecstatic Dance of Death, with
which she mesmerizes her audience and destroys the tragic unity of
the drama all at once. As the curtain falls, Electra’s dead body lies
inert upon the stage.31 Hofmannsthal thus shifts the emphasis away
from the murder of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus to the courageous
and defiant Atrean princess. Agamemnon’s mourning daughter is
not the meek and submissive slave girl of Euripides, disheveled and
dressed in rags. Instead, she becomes a dominant force in the
Atrean court, terrifying all those who cross her path.
This mythopoetic renewal of the Greek source text is further com-
plicated by its simultaneous translation of Freud’s theories of hyste¬

ria. Hofmannsthal’s Electra bears a striking resemblance to the hys¬
terical patient in Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer’s first famous
case study: “Fraulein Anna O.”32 While Electra suffers from the
memory of Agamemnon’s cruel murder, Freud and Breuer’s Anna
O. is plagued by her father’s recent death. Both women have an un¬
natural attachment, bordering on obsession, with the memory of the
father, the consequences of which manifest themselves in somatic
and psychic disturbances. Freud’s major theoretical breakthrough
in his analysis of these early case studies is the fundamental link be¬
tween the repression of memory and the ensuing hysteria. It is pre¬
cisely the recovery of the original trauma that becomes the cure for
the disorder. Freud labels this process a translation: “ ‘Repression’ is
the clinical term we use for a failed translation.”33
The translations in Hofmannsthal’s text are multiple and overlap¬
ping, beginning of course with the revision of the Sophocles text,
but compounded by the translation of Freud’s theories on hysteria
via “Anna O.” The scenario is further complicated by the transfer¬
ence of repressed memories, which are the cause of Electra’s suffer¬
ing. With so many elements of translation, more than doubling any
notion of source text, one might ask if the “strangeness” of my-
thopoesis leads to a forgetting of the myth altogether. Freud might
call the aspect of the foreign in the translated text the uncon¬
scious—perhaps this is where translation ends and myth begins.
While Benjamin’s concept of myth is entirely different from my-
thopoesis, his theory of the storyteller might shed some light on this
problem. For Benjamin, the value of a “story” (in the sense of narra¬
tive with overarching significance—i.e., myth) is not present in the
moment of inception. Unlike information, which is fleeting and mo¬
mentary, story transcends temporal-spatial limitations and has an
ever-growing aura: “[A story] does not expend itself. It preserves its
strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”34 Tike
Benjamin’s story, then, myth is the other of all narrative—in Freud’s
terms, a repression present only as an unconscious. If we compare
these considerations to Derrida’s assertion that the translatable un-
translatability of a text makes for its survival, then it becomes clear
that it is this incommensurability of the two texts, the alien in the
translation, that is the very means of rescuing and strengthening
myth. This is what Benjamin calls the afterlife of all translation.
Pound’s 1949 version of Elektra is and is not a more faithful trans¬
lation than that of Hofmannsthal. Pound’s drama is a line-by-line
translation of the original Sophocles, whereas Hofmannsthal’s work
can be considered an adaptation. But while Pound is committed to
reproducing the oral qualities and characteristics of the Greek, his ver¬
sion achieves an almost complete autonomy from the original Soph-
oclean tragedy. What Hofmannsthal demonstrates through the in¬
clusion of cultural markers prevalent in the Viennese fin-de-siecle
literary milieu, Pound achieves via linguistic means. Pound’s notion
of translation puts the foreign text in the service of a modernist po¬
etics. Rather than attempt to capture the strangeness in the original
text, he stimulates the same degree of alienation within the domes¬
tic cultural economy. That is to say, he first appropriates the foreign¬
ness of the source and then simulates this in the English language
by using passages of transliterated Greek, dialect, colloquialisms, ne¬
ologisms, archaic or elevated language, ellipsis, alliteration, asso¬
nance, and melopoeia to produce the desired autonomy of the new
text.35 To put it in Venuti’s terms, Pound deterritorializes his lan¬
guage from within, becoming a nomad writer in his own tongue.36
Like Benjamin, Pound views translation as a form of criticism or
interpretation, one view of the original rather than a literal render¬
ing in a new language. Here, the specific task of the translator is to
write Electra’s shadow as she dances to the rhythm of a tragedy he
knew all too well. The poet had been imprisoned for his actions dur¬
ing World War II, and was considered by many to be mentally incom¬
petent. In his translation of Sophocles’ drama, Pound pens a stub¬
born and defiant Electra to fight the battles he could not. His
heroine is not the grief-stricken maiden of antiquity, or the Freud¬
ian hysteric of Hofmannsthal’s drama, but a capable, strong, and
sane woman. Pound wanted to show that, like Electra, he could not
be silenced or censored by his incarceration.
Pound’s technique in his Elektra rests on producing an equivalent
strangeness in English to suggest the quality of the Greek. He never
sacrifices his own poetic voice to the difference of the Greek, but
transposes that language’s rhythms and melodies into his own infa¬
mous “Poundspeak.” Pound’s translation privileges the sonic over
the semantic, using his poetic genius to mimic the sounds of the
Greek, all the while communicating a clear message through choice
of vocabulary and emphasis. His mythopoetic project involves ma¬
nipulating the message to paint his own version of Electra’s truth.
For example, the many references to pain, grief, and sorrow pres¬
ent in Sophocles’ version are curiously understated in Pound’s
rendition. The poet suppresses the Greek lupein [to grieve, vex,
cause pain], transforming it into anger and hatred. If we compare
Pound’s translation to Jebb’s 1894 literal translation, in several in¬
stances we can see a marked difference, for example, during Elec-
tra’s long address to her sister, Chrysothemis, when she justifies her
steadfast resolve to seek revenge:
Jebb: “For me be it food enough that I do not / wound mine own con¬
science.”37
Pound: “If I don’t eat, I don’t make myself spew with disgust. / Keep my
self-respect somehow.”38
Jebb’s version shows a mournful heroine with a self-destructive urge,

while Pound turns the statement around to make her sound more
self-defiant. His Electra stifles all weakness and reflects instead a
sound clarity of mind. Throughout the action, the poet’s modern
protagonist stubbornly refuses to take a personal attitude toward suf¬
fering and opts to universalize it as a form of pity for mankind’s fail¬
ure and as a call to action. Pound’s translation is in many cases less
faithful to Sophocles’ original than either Jebb or David Grene, but
he reserves the right to make a strong mythopoetic statement and in
the process challenges the supremacy and privilege of origin.39
Pound’s translation poetics are in contrast to many other mod¬
erns including T. S. Eliot, whose adaptation of the Electra myth in
Family Reunion is a thorough domestication of the myth, so much so
that one might not even know that it is based upon an Attic tragedy.
Eliot’s version is more of a transposition than a translation as such.
The Atrean story is superimposed upon the cultural milieu of upper-
class British society in the early twentieth century and only a skele¬
ton of the Sophoclean narrative remains.40 Both Pound and Eliot
follow a modernist paradigm, seeking autonomy for their literary
productions regardless of source, but each achieves this via different
means.
Though Venuti is intrigued in particular by Pound’s techniques of
alienation and autonomy, he ends up labeling this cultural policy
both romantic and patriarchal.41 He accuses the poet of being more
concerned with strengthening and influencing the English canon
than with the classics themselves. In this respect, Pound’s poetics re¬
flect the translation politics of Schleiermacher and his contempo¬
raries. Like the German Romantics, his choice of mythological
source is of high universal order and thus deemed worthy of influ¬
encing the English canon, yet it was plainly highjacked and distorted
to suit the modernist cultural agenda. Pound never borrowed, he
simply stole outright.
With Pound’s mythopoetics, we are confronted once again with
the dichotomy of transcendence from mythology and the forging of
a new mythology through the introduction of the foreign into the

domestic. Venuti concludes that this poetic policy was in a way a self-
defeating mission, for his rhetoric of cultural autonomy ended up
“developing translation practices that drew on a broad range of do¬
mestic discourses and repeatedly recovered the excluded and the
marginal to challenge the dominant.’’42 Venuti may have a point;
however we should give Pound credit where credit is due—he was
highly influential in putting an end to the primacy of the transpar¬
ent translation that had ruled since the seventeenth century.
The translation of myth has been a constant struggle between ori¬
gin and invention, since repetition is always both a return and a dif¬
ference. But permanence and transformation need not conflict with
each other if, as Eva Kushner argues, the permanence of myths “lies
not in the fixity of narrative detail, nor in the ontological unity of
the human mind . . . but in the very dynamics of myth itself.”43 Simi¬
larly, myth can be viewed as a collapsing of the border between
“truth” and “lies,” if we agree that “myth is the force of ‘invention’:
a power that founds itself as its own absolute foundation.”44 As a
founding fiction, then, somewhere between fixity and flux, myth
must be a performative and self-perpetuating narrative, what Jean-
Luc Nancy calls “auto-poetic mimesis.”45 What for Benjamin is the
afterlife of a work and for Derrida the strangeness of the double
makes itself available only through the translation of myth. .And yet
translation’s emancipatory potential rests on the denial of a stable
and knowable origin. The symbiotic and oscillatory relationship be¬
tween fixed and transitory elements, between origin and perform¬
ance, is the magic in the translation of myth that keeps alive our
“fragile moorings to Being.”46
Notes
1. This essay will deal primarily with the conceptual links between translation and myth.
However, I shall address specific aspects of translation practice in my discussion of Ezra
Pound’s Elektra.
2. Mythopoeticsis the general theory of the production of myth, and mythopoesis is the actual
creation of new versions of already existing myths. The term is historically contingent in the
sense that mythopoesis means something vastly different in the eighteenth century than it
does in the twentieth century. For example, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra is a creative
translation and interpretation, whereas in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra andjean-
Paul Sartre’s Les mouches the boundaries of myth are much more permeable. Similarly, the
poetic Electra texts of H.D. and Sylvia Plath extract and shape a single character from the
Atrean myth. But even Homer practiced mythopoesis by structuring the oral culture of myth
for a written format.
3. Quoted in Jaan Puhvel, Comparative Mythology (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1987), 14. Muller’s oft-cited phrase is used to illustrate mythology’s claims to self-
importance. His critique of myth is really a longing for a “healthy” pure language, uncontam¬
inated by metaphor. Myth is for him a corrupting influence. Muller (1823-1900) comes at
the tail end of a long line of German Romantic philosophers intent on establishing myth as
an absolute quality, capable of reflecting a transcendent human consciousness. It was their
intent to keep the purity of myth intact and to fend off any trend toward the interpretation
of myth. This presents an obvious conundrum since Romantic philosophers employed their
own hermeneutic methods in order to prove the transcendence of myth.
4. Quoted in Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Inivisibility (New York: Routledge, 1995),
1.
5. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford Univer¬
sity Press, 1975), vii.
6. Quoted in Steiner, After Babel, 235.
7. Walter Benjamin, “Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, no. 1
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 9-21. All translations are my own, except where indicated.
8. Benjamin explains that the essence of a text is expressed “in language and not through
language.” Walter Benjamin, “Uber die Sprache uberhaupt und uber die Sprache des Men-
schen,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, no. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 142. Language is infi¬
nitely self-reflexive in that every language expresses its essence first and foremost to itself in a
tautological imperative. This essence or magical element of language is further expressed
through the relationship of one language to another in the act of translation.
9. George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 304. Steiner brings
with him a wealth of knowledge and adds immeasurable insight to the problem of human
expression, and yet his privileging of “Greek myth” over other ancient myth systems is some¬
what problematic. He himself raises the issue of the “unbroken authority of Greek myths over
the imagination of the West,” and justifies their exclusivity by suggesting that they encode
primary biological and social confrontations and therefore make up part of our collective
memory: “We come home to them in our psychic roots” (ibid., 300-301). While it is likely
that Western cultures have been more influenced by the myths of ancient Greece than by
the stories of other civilizations, Steiner’s silence on this issue is nevertheless significant. His
preoccupation with Hellenic Greece perpetuates another myth—that of fixed origin of civili¬
zation.
10. Ibid., 135.
11. Schelling’s pronouncement of myth as a “tautegorical” absolute renders it endlessly
and exclusively self-reflexive. More recently, Jean-Luc Nancy has taken a similar approach,
stating that “myth is a myth.” See Jean-Luc Nancy, Inoperative Community, ed. and trans. Peter
O’Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 52. He appropriates the views
of the German Romantics in order to argue that myth is an unthinkable limit to presence and
being, a suspension or interruption of the subject.
12. Venuti, Translator’s Inivisibility, 41.
13. Douglas Robinson, Translation and Taboo (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
1996), 198.
14. Ibid., 204.
15. Robinson seems to have misunderstood Benjamin's “pure language,” which in fact ex¬
presses the fundamental otherness within language and not a transparency or immanence.
Benjamin was more interested in a theory of naming than he was in contributing to theories
of translation as a cultural practice.
16. See John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antimonies of Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1993) for a full discussion of Benjamin’s concept of “dream-kitsch” and the
critique of myth.
17. Strangely, Adorno and Horkheimer argue in The Dialectic of Enlightenment that a return
to myth is actually the means to escape the dangers of myth: “In the layers of Homer’s mate¬
rial, myth has been suppressed. The account of them, however, the unity forced out of the
diffuse legends, is at the same time the description of the subject’s escape-route from the
mythical powers.” See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aujklarung: Philo-
sophischeFragmente (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969), 61.
18. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Reflektierter Mythos,” in Mythe et creation, ed. Pierre Cazier (Lille:
Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1994), 9.
19. Puhvel, Comparative Mythology, 1.
20. Burten Feldman and Robert Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology: 1680-1860
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 227.
21. Ibid., 262.
22. Robert Fagles and W. B. Stanford, “Introduction,” The Oresleia (Harmondsworth: Pen¬
guin Books, 1977), 93.
23. Aeschylus, The Oresleia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 1.752,
1.756.
24. While tragedy aims to civilize myth through its poetic structures, it cannot ultimately
transcend the powers of its ancient, mysterious roots, which seem always to seep forth like a
text seen through a palimpsest. Translating myth into new times and spaces makes it available
to modern audiences, but its narrative force is not diminished.
25. Sophocles, Electro. Plays: 11, trans. Kenneth McLeish (London: Methuen, 1990),
1.1508-10.
26. Robinson, Translation and Taboo, 189.
27. Quoted in Andrew Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosphy: A New Theory of
Words (New York: Routledge, 1989), 5.
28. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Elektra: Tragodie in einem Aufzug (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001).
29. Martin Mueller, “Hofmannsthal's Elektra and Its Dramatic Models,” Modem Drama 29,
no. 1 (1986): 72.
30. Klaus E. Bohnenkamp, “Deutsche Antiken-Ubertragungen als Grundlage der Grie-
chendramen Hofmannsthals,” Euphorion 70, no. 2 (1976): 198.
31. The tragic unity is disturbed by the addition of the Dance of Death. According to the
principles of Aristotelian tragedy, the unity of the drama pivots on the vengeful murders of
Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. When Hofmannsthal’s F.lectra performs her triumphant Toten-
tanz and falls lifeless to the ground, the tragic unity is broken. Her dead body remains on stage
as a physical remainder, a residue or a supplement to the dramatic action. The materiality of
her body acts like an open-ended question and not a tidy tragic conclusion.
32. There is evidence that Hofmannsthal knew of Freud’s work and of the Case Studies in
Hysteria (1895) in particular because of a letter he wrote to his friend Hermann Bahr asking
to borrow his copy of the work. See Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Briefe II: 1900-1909 (Vienna:
Bermann-Fischer, 1937), 42. Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, “Fraulein Anna O.,” in Stud¬
ies in Hysteria. The Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth
Press, 1955), 2: 21-47. For a full analysis and comparison of Hofmannsthal’s Electra and
Freud’s “Anna O.,” seejill Scott, “The Passion According to the Analyst: Hofmannsthal’s Elek¬
tra on the Couch,” Biffures 1, no. 1 (1997): 81-96.
33. Quoted in Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy, 19.
34. Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzahler,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, no. 2 (Frankfurt: Suhr-
kamp, 1991), 445-46.
35. Examples of Pound’s careful attention to the reproduction of sounds abound in his
Elektra, such as the heroine’s self-designation as a “ninny,” mirroring the Greek nepios, mean¬
ing childish. While ninny is not a synonym for the Greek, Pound manages to replicate the
sonic quality of the original. Sir Richard Jebb’s 1894 translation, which Pound used almost
exclusively as his study aid for the Greek, uses the word “foolish” for the Greek nepios. See
Ezra Pound and Rudd Flemming, Elektra, ed. Richard Reid (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer¬
sity Press, 1989). Sir Richard Jebb, trans., Electra, in Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments (Cam¬
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924).
36. Lawrence Venuti, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 204.
37. Jebb, Electra, 1.363-64.
38. Pound, Elektra, 1.418-19.
39. David Grene, trans., Sophocles' Electra. Greek Tragedies, vol. 2, ed. David Grene and Rich¬
ard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
40. See T. S. Eliot, The Family Reunion (London: Faber & Faber, 1963).
41. Venuti, Rethinking Translation, 191.
42. Ibid., 203.
43. Eva Kushner, “Greek Myths in Modern Drama: Paths of Transformation,” in Literary
Criticism and Myth, ed. Joseph Strelka (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1980), 201.
44. Christopher Bracken, “Oedipus in Translation: Psychoanalysis and the Language of
Anthropology” (paper presented at the Conference on Globalization and Translation, Uni¬
versity of Toronto, October 1996), 1.
45. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 56.
46. Steiner, Antigones, 133.
Intracultural Translations:
Validating Regional Identities in
Nineteenth-Century German Realism
Arne Koch
University of Kansas
Ik kann't nich hochdiitsch seggen,

Wat mi in’n Bussen sitt,
Dat is man halwes Snacken,
Dat Best will doch nich mit.
—Alwine Wuthenow
Hence the German . . . can always be

superior to the foreigner and understand him fully,
even better than the foreigner understands himself . . .
On the other hand, there is no doubt
that he [the foreigner] will leave
what is genuinely German untranslated.
—-Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Parameters of Translation
T RANSLATION always exposes at once parameters of differ¬

ence and sameness. Such an opening proclamation may well
be yesterday’s news to most readers. Every reader who was ever en¬
gaged in the process of comparing an original text with its transla¬
tion recognizes such relational processes within the stricter linguis¬
tic domains of two texts. And while difference and sameness of this
type still may be exemplars more easily observed than more elusive
mediations between expressions of identity, the cultural turn in
translation studies during the 1990s1 would indicate a pronounced
effort to find a balance between linguistic and cultural concerns. Il¬
lustrating this necessary balance, the above epigraphs readily articu¬
late central issues for inquiries into translations or into the opposi¬
tion to the act of translation. Both Wuthenow2 and Fichte ' candidly
suggest the potential of the original’s intranslatability or, at the very
73
least, the inability to express the foundation of the original in a dif¬

ferent language. The underlying implication of either quote, how¬
ever, goes beyond the mere possibility of translation. For one would
agree that translation is feasible, even if we often continue to engage
critically in questions concerning accuracy, faithfulness, and more
subtle concerns such as tone or quality. Beneath the veil of (in)-
translatability expressed in the two ecxerpts, one recognizes some¬
thing else, as the impetus for each statement is vastly different. Wu-
thenow is less brazen in her doubt of the translatability of feeling
from her Low German dialect, while Fichte does not hold back an
assumed cultural superiority of the German language. In spite of
this variation, the similarity of the accentuated relation between
one’s own language and a form of translation reveals an inherent
sense of identity as well as a desire to maintain and express identity
through the original word.
Our comparison of these introductory references of notions
about translation and identity uncovers similar conceptions and
thus suggests the potential for a paradigmatic discourse-function of
the act of translation. Moreover, it also exposes an important varia¬
tion in perspective that will be essential for this essay’s reading of
intracultural translation in nineteenth-century German realism.
After all, Wuthenow locates her translation dilemma within the
boundaries of one pronounced culture, as defined by the common¬
ality of High German and the implied concept of the Kulturnation.
Fichte’s observations from 1807-08, on the other hand, thrive on
discernible differences that lie between languages of distinct nations
or cultures. In Fichte’s articulation of cultural superiority and the
claim of something “genuinely German” in his expression of iden¬
tity and a state of sameness (Germanness) there lingers at its core
an expression of difference. This manifestation of difference fosters,
as a result, not only an awareness of one’s own identity, but in this
extreme case it even stimulates an aggressive look back at the very
existence of difference. Cultural difference shapes sameness and, as
this one example suggests, transforms it further into a possible ex¬
pression of cultural hegemony.
Expressions of hegemony in a discourse on language therefore
often affect even the very national culture that it sets out to repre¬
sent. This predicament emerges as a central concern for writers in
the nineteenth century when regional affiliations combined with a
dedication to realist authenticity frequently demanded the inclusion
of a primary or secondary use of one’s local dialect. In part because
of the quasi-natural tendency to represent geographical and linguis¬
tic particularity, regional literature therefore has traditionally found
KOCH: INTRACULTURAL TRANSLATIONS 75
itself on the margins of a German national literature. A look at the

category of Trivialliteratur reveals that many regional narratives were
pidgeonholed as kitsch or insignificant, in part for their regional
specificity. And while the appeal of regional characteristics on cele¬
brated mainstream literary texts of the realist movement still sub¬
sisted (e.g., local color, provincial histories, etc.), restrictive dynam¬
ics created by the push for an unfulfilled political unity guided even
literary regionalists to eschew their attachment to composing in
their own dialect. Consequently, the apparent political homogeneity
exerted by Prussian-led efforts to accomplish unification left visible
traces within the production of literary texts. Cultural conformity
was the outcome of avoiding dialect compositions and electing
translation into the dominant standard language. Some critics have
firmly argued that this increasingly conformist representation aes¬
thetically reenacted the given sociocultural reality of an incipient
political hegemony with all its detrimental consequences.4
By contrasting well-known regional writers from the mid-1800s,
this essay uses assumptions about homogenizing cultural dynamics
as a point of departure to investigate what role their decisions to
translate from dialect to standard German played in reaching a na¬
tional audience and in contributing to debates on German unity.
The primary comparison of Berthold Auerbach (1812-82) with his
contemporary Fritz Reuter (1810-74) is intriguing for a number of
reasons: Auerbach wrote in High German with only brief dialect pas¬
sages, while Reuter wrote most of his works in his Low German dia¬
lect and instead used occasional translations into the standard lan¬
guage or insertions of High German only as interpolation. An
analysis of these noteworthy discrepancies becomes central to un¬
derstanding the deference of dialects (or lack thereof) to the coa¬
lescing standard language as a cipher for the reality of social, cul¬
tural, and political regions within a unifying Germany. It is
important for readers to approach these literary figures therefore as
key illustrations of a discourse on translation and its inherent impli¬
cations, rather than solely as evidence for the onslaught against dia¬
lect literature by a national culture and its increased effort of pro¬
ducing compliance.
A number of theoretical considerations will help ascertain how a
discourse on translation serves as a device to establish the place of
a particular region within (or in-between) the nation and further
highlight its insistence on maintaining a sense of singularity within
the national whole. Informed by recent historical investigations of
German regionality in the 1800s, this essay draws on a number of
interrelated extraliterary concerns to demonstrate the connectivity
between the cultural, social, and economic facets of a politics of

translation.5 The recognition of regional particularities within the
formation of national identity is an important impulse for our un¬
derstanding of how regional literature and the use of intratextual/
intracultural translation contribute to a local (de)construction of
nationhood. In conjunction with M. M. Bakhtin’s notion of speech
types and Homi Bhaba’s observations on competition and differ¬
ence within a given culture,6 a sociohistorical reading ultimately
allows the reader to unveil cultural and interconnected ideological
dynamics within the act of translation. Additionally, recent insight
into translation theory will accentuate these inner dynamics and ex¬
ternal ties of translation itself. Clem Robyns’s proposed stances of
discursive acts of translation, for instance, will help evaluate the per¬
haps most frequently encountered type of translation in dialect liter¬
ature.7 Our first examples from Auerbach and other regional writers
demonstrate this illusory defensive nature of dialect stemming from
translations into the standard language or the very avoidance of dia¬
lect at all cost.
Negotiations for Superregional Audiences
Robyns loosely defines a defensive stance in translation as “one in

which otherness is acknowledged but still transformed.”8 This trans¬
formation takes place when regional dialects and regionally specific
speech types—to borrow a Bakhtinian concept—are converted into
a language that is shared and understood by a broader readership.
Readers in this category are located primarily outside the regional
locality where the narrative originated and can be distinguished as a
superregional or possibly a national audience. As the following ex¬
amples demonstrate, speech types take different shapes but may in¬
clude the stylization of oral everyday speech, of written everyday nar¬
ration (i.e., diaries, legal documents), extra-artistic authorial speech
(i.e., ethnographic observations), and the individualized speech of
characters.9 More importantly, the subsequent models expose a
shared potential for identification and resistance that allows readers
in the end to reevaluate the alleged defensive nature of translation.
Exemplary excerpts help establish that the misconceived defensive¬
ness of translation is perhaps instead a concealed form of attack.
The expression of regional difference or particularity achieves such
an offensive stance despite the effort of making this difference deci¬
pherable for everyone through translation, thus aiming for linguistic
regularity or sameness. To further underscore this argument, the
following descriptive designations distinguish select models of de¬

fensive translation: 1) parenthetical; 2) preparatory; 3) encyclope¬
dic.10 In no way intended to serve as labels that will include all forms
of translation, examples from these three groups represent none¬
theless popular modes of translation.
In his signature novella Die schwarze Spinne (1842; The black spi¬
der), the Swiss regionalist and father of the German Dorfgeschichte
[Village Tale] Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854) guarantees his super-
regional audience’s comprehension of specific regional dialect in¬
sertions by immediately providing parenthetical translations into
High German. This effort to ensure that all readers comprehend via
translation what is regionally different, for example “Gotte” as
“Patin,” that is as a god-mother, appears at first glance to be nothing
but a simple transformation into the standard language.11 The
northern German Theodor Storm (1817-88) also utilizes defensive
translation in Aquis Submersus (1876), which stands out above all for
its preparatory translation.12 The narrator introduces a central saying
first in translation, “verhochdeutscht” (AS, 2:384; turned into high
German) as he states himself, to guarantee later comprehension (or
simple recognition) when readers encounter once again the motto
engraved in its original dialect form: “Geliek as Rook un Stoof
verswmdt, / Also sind ock de Minschenkind” [Just as smoke and
dust disappear / So also do men’s children] (AS, 2:431). Both par¬
enthetical and preparatory translations of inaccessible words or
phrases suggest a clear narratorial intent to provide readability and
comprehensibility even for audiences outside specific regions,
which even today often remain linguistically exclusive. Exactly the
same function fulfills the encyclopedic translation that Storm provides
at the end of his masterpiece Der Schimmelreiter (1888; The rider on
the white horse). The abundance of technical and regional phrases
in this novella clearly necessitates a translation device to guarantee
the successful reading experience of its readers. “Fur Binnenlan-
dische Leser” [For readers from the interior] (AS, 3:756) is conse¬
quently the title of an attached minidictionary at the end of the no¬
vella, which immediately denotes an intent beyond simple
translation. It includes as well an articulation of difference in the
very process of aiming for the same level of comprehension. Nonlo¬
cal, noncoastal, nonregional—but still German—readers are pro¬
vided with a tool to access what would otherwise require “extrane¬
ous knowledge.”13 Noticeably, the narrator elected a process of
translation that would even further elevate the specificity of the re¬
gional account and dialect and ultimately create awareness among
all readers of this existing regional difference and specificity. With-
out a doubt good cases of defensive translation, the very fact that all
three examples even include regional dialect within the High Ger¬
man text, demonstrates a distinct appreciation of their difference
and the potential of using dialect to accentuate this awareness.14 The
texts do not fully denigrate the relevance of dialect, but instead leave
the original alongside its translation. These odds and ends create an
acknowledgment of their own Sprachgemeinschaft, or language com¬
munity, as well as a potential opposition to others.15
Nonetheless, each instance illustrates explicitly a motivation for
the act of translation that appears rather utilitarian, namely in the
assurance that all readers regardless of their acquired knowledge or
linguistic ability can partake in the experience of reading. It could
be a bit misleading, therefore, to view Storm and Gotthelf as articu¬
lating a true discourse on translation. This appears to be, however,
exactly the case in Berthold Auerbach’s Befehlerles (1842; The little
dictator), a short tale divided into two sections, which are variations
of the same theme: external authorities interfere with established
customs, and protests by individuals from the community ensue.
Throughout Auerbach’s Village Tales it is remarkable to note that
only on rare occasions the use of his southwest Swabian dialect inter¬
rupts the prevalence of High German.16 Befehlerles and his 1843 tale
Der Lauterbacher, a tale about a teacher from the city who tries to es¬
tablish new reading and learning habits among the rural popula¬
tion, do not deviate from this pattern. Instead, both cases reveal Au¬
erbach’s careful effort that his readers should not find it too difficult
to read and understand the occasional dialect insertions. In Der
Lauterbacher, for instance, the narrator suddenly discontinues the
use of dialect by one of the characters and goes on to explain his
decision in a footnote: “Hedwig sprach immer ganz im Dialekt, zum
bessern Verstandnis geben wir es aber moglichst hochdeutsch
wieder” [Hedwig always spoke entirely in dialect, but for better un¬
derstanding we will reproduce it if possible in High German].17 It is
tempting to regard this truly infrequent use of dialect in ways similar
to landscape portrayals, namely as sheer local color. But the focus
should be to unravel what effect the dialect and its translation have
on the narrative and, particularly in a case where external authori¬
ties are intruding into an established community, how the juxtaposi¬
tion of dialect and Hochdeutsch [High/Standard German] results in
interesting discords.
The juxtaposition and eventual translation immediately draw
clear lines between members of the regional community and repre¬
sentatives of superregional authorities. And while disagreement ex¬
ists on the functionality of language as an indicator of membership
to a certain community, since a language can ultimately be acquired

by anyone who is willing to learn it,18 it does not lessen the antago¬
nism created by contrasting groups through the use of dialect vis-a-
vis the standard language. The decision itself whether or not to use
dialect for a particular character already signifies an allegiance to or
emphasis of a certain locality as well as the willingness to demon¬
strate it publicly.1'1 This tension presents itself in Befehlerles when
young Aivle is interrogated in court about an incident in which her
suitor and later husband Mathes placed a traditional maypole out¬
side her window against a recently introduced public ordinance.
While narratorial comments aim at creating an obvious dislike for
the court whose officials are characterized as cold-hearted beings
(GS, 1: 165), it is Aivle’s use of her Swabian dialect, in contrast to the
civil-servants’ High German “officialese,” that leads to less direct an¬
tipathy.20 Aivle’s interview culminates in the officials’ request for the
girl to sign the interview transcript:
Nun wurde ihm das Protokoll vorgelesen, worin die Aussagen in hoch-
deutsche Sprache ubersetzt und in zusammenhangende Rede gebracht
waren; von alle dem Weinen und den Qualen des Madchens stand kein
Wort darin. Aivle erstaunte tiber alles das, was es da gesagt hatte; aber es
unterschrieb doch . . . (GS, 1: 168)
[The testimony, in which her statement was translated into the High
German language and brought into coherent flow, was now read back to
her; of all the crying and suffering of the girl, there was not one word to
be found. Aivle was surprised by all of the things she had said; but she
signed nonetheless . . . ]
No direct auctorial commentary is needed to invoke the manipula¬

tion that the court may well have performed in this act of transla¬
tion. It is rather subtle how translation into the officials’ Hochdeutsch
insinuates wrongdoing. Moreover, one has to stress that Aivle’s sur¬
prise does not by any means indicate her inability to understand
nondialect, but rather that the officials’ notes must contain informa¬
tion that is different from the one she provided in her interview.21
Accordingly, her expression of surprise is the result of what is and
what is not included in the transcript. Apparently, the “translators”
added elements that were not spoken (“Aivle was surprised by all of
the things she had said”), yet the translation also fails to express all
of the nonverbal elements that perhaps only come across in dialect,
namely her “crying and suffering.” Readers are reminded through
this episode of the epigraph by Wuthenow and her insistence that
High German does not allow for relating internal aspects, the emo-
tional foundation of the original, that is, the nuances of dialects, soc-
iolect, or ideolects : “Dat Best will doch nich mit.”
As Aivle’s astonishment further underlines, the shaping of her
words “into a coherent flow” takes place; translation reveals itself as
an act of transformation, which can also entail editorial work. Yet,
objection to this perceived intrusion into the village community by
the authorities is not voiced explicitly, partly, because for the narra¬
tor (Auerbach) this type of criticism might be synonymous with self-
criticism, as he engages in similar practices. The narrator deems his
form of translation, his editorial work, appropriate as it serves a bet¬
ter understanding for his nonregional audience (GS, 2: 159). One
could take this intriguing similarity a bit too far by observing that
the narrator (ab)uses his position of authority over the reader much
like the court officials (ab)used their position of authority in record¬
ing their village constituents’ statements. Regardless, both the narra¬
tor and the outside authorities actively engage themselves in a medi¬
ation process, thereby occupying the same playing held of
translation. Still, in the end it is in the narrator’s act of translation
that he articulates a discourse on translation as a struggle for iden¬
tity. Auerbach’s unmistakable effort to reach out to a nonregional,
a nonlocal audience seems at first to counter the accentuated con¬
tent of the narrative, which impeaches external intervention. At
least on the surface, the drawing of a superregional audience into
the events and developments of the region lessens this repudiation
of superregional influences. In spite of that, in the process of bring¬
ing together the subject-region and the audience-nation, the audi¬
ence recognizes the pressures stemming from the authorities that
are positioned at the same site where they, the audiences, are lo¬
cated, namely physically removed from the region. Eventually, this
involvement of the audience supports an outspoken rejection as it
comes to identify with the collective wir [we] that is subjugated by
the intruding authority. Therefore, in reaching out to the nonre¬
gional constituency and in presenting abusive translation tech¬
niques, the narrator achieves the recognition of acts of transgres¬
sions.
What appears, then, at first as another prime example of defen¬
sive translation, reveals ultimately an inherent duality in the process
of translation: the creation of sameness (a language catered to su¬
perregional audiences) in the moment of emphasizing difference
(dialect as an element of a Bewufitseinsraum, a realm of consciousness
and identity) .22 It is in the insistence on difference within the domi¬
nant standard language, within the centralized culture, that Auer¬
bach’s brief but poignant illustration of an act of intracultural trans-
lation helps his readership recognize a claim for a continued

regional distinctiveness within the national whole.
Regional Resistance: The Denial of Translation
Translation of his northeast Mecklenburg Plattdeutsch, or Low Ger¬

man, into High German was an unacceptable option for Fritz Reu¬
ter. His objections were fueled by that sense that translations were
incapable of recreating the traditions and atmosphere of his home
region and that translation would destroy an inherent presence of
difference in the dialect narrative. Reuter’s well-documented resis¬
tance to repeated efforts of publishing in High German throughout
his correspondence with contemporary literary figures may there¬
fore surprise readers,23 for this attitude of “Low German Only” did
not hinder a wide reception throughout the German-speaking
world. In fact, shortly after Reuter’s death in 1874, the sale of over
one million copies of his collected works made him one of the best¬
selling German authors of the century.24
Just as Reuter’s dedication to Low German helps establish his re¬
gional affiliation, so does the narrative’s thematic and historical con¬
centration on the Duchy Mecklenburg and the mostly agrarian pop¬
ulation of this region within Prussia. Critics have consequently noted
a supposed difficulty of placing Reuter within a national tradition of
German literature because even an event of a national magnitude,
such as the revolution of 1848, is regionalized. Led by the influential
theorist of German Realism Julian Schmidt, contemporary critics
condemned dialect writers such as Reuter for endeavors to consti¬
tute their regions “als eigne Nation” [as its own nation].25 The out¬
ward appearance of particularizing attempts, stressed both by dialect
and the emphasis on distinct localities, automatically raises the ques¬
tion whether narratives such as Reuter’s novels successfully establish
a coexistence of regional and national affiliations. Looking back at
Auerbach’s critique of intruding elements as attempts to negate re¬
gional distinctions in the act of translation, it will be important to
see whether Reuter’s texts aesthetically reconstruct a position of
maintaining both regional and German identities, while critically
addressing the administrative and political structures of an expand¬
ing Prussia. Whereas such a subversive potential is scattered
throughout his lengthy tales, often hidden, as Reuter himself ob¬
served, “zwischen den Zeilen meiner Schreibereien” [between the
lines of my compositions] (GW, 8: 500), the critical potential of a
discourse on translation will best be illustrated by examples from the
novels Ut mine Festungstid (1862; Seven years of my life) and Ut de

Stromtid (1864; Seed-time and harvest, or, during my apprentice¬
ship).
At the heart of his autobiographical novel Ut mine Festungstid read¬
ers are faced with Reuter’s descriptions of the last three years of his
imprisonment in various Prussian fortresses. He had originally faced
the death penalty for his political pursuits as a student, but the pen¬
alty had been reduced to life in prison before his eventual release.
Throughout the unfolding of often horrendous conditions, the nar¬
rator effectively imparts a negative portrayal of the injustice he had
received through a Prussian court. But what may seem to be entirely
geared at promoting regional awareness against intruding political,
administrative, and cultural incursions, should not be misread as a
particularistic cause to disrupt efforts of unifying the German
estates. Rather, the promotion of regional distinctiveness within a
unified whole emerges as the goal, which explains expressions of
identification at once for a regional Heimat—“min Vaderland,
Mecklenborg” [my fatherland Mecklenburg] (GW, 7: 329)—and for
the German nation. Yet within the articulation of national identity,
a critical objection surfaces to the methods of how this nation
should be accomplished. By addressing Prussian rule in the course
of unification, disapproval therefore does not originate only in the
narrator’s personal experiences. Instead, knowledge is shared with
many others, including first and foremost his audience. The collec¬
tive “uns” [us] embraces a readership that expands well beyond
Mecklenburg. Much like Auerbach, Reuter involves a superregional
group within his regional experiences. At one point, the narrator
proclaims almost prophetically:
So was’t dunnmals in Diitschland . . . Sei seggn jo, PreuBen hett up

Stun’ns de Fiihrung in Diitschland awernamen . . . un wo hett’t uns
dunn henftihrt? De ganze Karr, de mit alle Kraft un Gewalt, mit Haw un
Gaud, mit Tran und Blaud von dat Volk ut den franzosischen Sump rut-
erreten was, hett dat dunn in en Grawen smeten un den einzelnen mit
Ungerechtigkeit und Grausamkeit verfolgt. (GIT 7: 518; emphasis added)
[Those were the conditions in Germany at that time . . . They say, Prussia
has taken over the leadership in Germany at this time . . . and where did
it lead us? The whole cart, which the people once pulled out of the
French swamp with all its force and power, with all its possessions, with
tears and blood, this cart, Prussia has again directed in a ditch and it has
persecuted individuals with injustice and cruelty.]
Regional resistance during the wars of liberation against Napoleonic

rule paved the way for German unity under Prussian leadership.
However, partly due to Prussia’s failed guidance and its cruel and
unjust practices that followed, support of this goal can no longer be
provided at any cost. Cruelty and injustice, which are listed within
the dialect text as untranslatable High German expressions of Prus¬
sia’s Gewaltpolitik, a politics of force or tyranny, reverberate only too
visibly young Aivle’s suffering in Auerbach’s Befehlerles.
A similar tyrannic regime is expressed in this manner in Reuter’s
recurring juxtaposition of dialect and High German, which puts the
accent on the repeatedly strategic denial of translation into dialect.
Possibly the most revealing moment of reproach to centralized ad¬
ministrative and inhumane practices is the insertion of the original
judgment that had led to the narrator’s (Reuter’s) imprisonment.
The use of dialect by the narrator and the majority of characters,
regardless of social standing, is abruptly interrupted by a different
voice, by another language.26 The voice’s disassociation from the
narrator’s region presents itself through a twofold process: transla¬
tion into dialect is denied and the verdict is provided in its original
form as the Beamtensprache, the officialese of the court. Moreover, its
distinct language is further elevated through a representative of this
external order, who operates as the mouthpiece delivering the ver¬
dict. In a dialogue with the narrator, Justizrat Schroder proclaims
the following:
Sie haben sich nicht zu beschweren, denn das Gesetz sagt ausdrucklich:
Konat des Hochverrats wird bestraft wie der Hochverrat selbst. Nach
Ihrer eigenen Aussage ist der konstatierte Zweck Ihrer Verbindung gew-
esen: “Herbeifuhrung eines aufVolksfreiheit und Volkseinheit gegrunde-
ten deutschen Staatslebens”; dies hat man richterlicherseits fur einen
Konat des Hochverrats angesehen; ob mit Recht oder Unrecht, lasse ich
dahingestellt (Notabene dit was nah 1848); aber das Gesetz ist salviert.
(GW, 6: 328)
[You, sir, have no reason to complain, because the law says explicitly:
knowledge of treason will be punished as treason itself. According to
your own testimony, the stated purpose of your association was: “The
Formation of a German nation based upon the liberty and unity of its
people”; this was understood by the courts as knowledge of treason;
whether just or unjust, I will leave open (let it be noted, this was after
1848); but the law is exculpated.]
Within this long and excessively formal explanation of the penalty,

the narrator attaches a brief yet poignant comment about the situa¬
tion by stressing—in dialect and parenthesis—that the conversation
took place after the watershed year 1848, that is, during a time in
which previously harsh measures against students’ activities were

now more openly rejected. In conjunction with an ensuing expres¬
sion—in dialect—of utter surprise about how the same proclama¬
tions of liberty and unity now had become everybody’s motto, in¬
cluding that of Prussia (GW, 6: 329), the untranslated manifestation
of the authoritative word is visibly elevated as different. Its difference
is partly due to the stylization as an extraliterary—Bakhtin desig¬
nates it as “extra-artistic”—authorial speech type, but difference
also stems from the emphasis on two opposing languages as ideolo¬
gies. After all, there are various instances in which the narrator
freely translates into dialect or at least paraphrases events or state¬
ments from its High German original. In this case, stressed through
the refusal of translation into the customary language of Low Ger¬
man, the use and juxtaposition of languages transmits different
worldviews.27 It brings the inherently political value of two languages
to the surface, namely, that of the verdict and of the narrator’s com¬
mentary.
The narrator’s—and region’s—striving for liberty and unity is
condemned by Prussian authorities, and this condemnation is pre¬
sented powerfully by means of the authority’s own pragmatic lan¬
guage. Ironically, even the narrator’s ill-fated efforts of his associa¬
tion with politically oriented students were translated by the
authority into containing a supposed intent. Initially expressed in
his own words (“your own testimony”), his efforts have been
changed into an admission of a supposed “purpose” only through
translation or transformation into the language of the court. Just as
Aivle in Auerbach’s Village Tale expressed her surprise about this
manipulative nature of translation, so does the narrator when he ex¬
claims his disbelief: “Un wat hadden wi denn dahri? Nicks, gor nicks”
[And what exactly did we do? Nothing, absolutely nothing] (GW, 6:
329). A reader’s ability to detect the tension between two languages
through such exemplary passages leads ultimately to recognizing
the powerful function of translation. It also illustrates in the act of
translation (or its omission) how regionally distinct characteristics
appear side by side with a nationally relevant discourse, i.e., the ex¬
pression of freedom and the resistance to external enemies. Reu¬
ter’s focalization on (and denial of) translation concentrates the
narrative’s overall double perspective of Ut mine Festungstid on both
regional and national questions. Similar passages amplify the narra¬
tive as a promotion of regional difference and distinctiveness within
a unified whole, but also against certain centralizing dynamics in the
process of shaping the then unfulfilled German nation.
A kind of tension between languages other than the one between
dialect and standard occurs in Reuter’s most widely read novel Ut de

Stromtid. Once again, it is about more than simply determining who
uses dialect and who does not, for readers encounter a third lan¬
guage category that appears to be lost somewhere between High and
Low German: Messingsch. Sociolinguistically, Messingsch is an in-be¬
tween form that straddles the line between Low German articulation
and High German grammar, which one may still encounter today in
everyday conversation in northern Germany. Another difference to
the Festungstid is that social distinctions are emphasized by portray¬
ing the more educated and landowning characters through their
use of High German. Even if this social group is rendered positively,
their use of a particular language still serves the specific purpose of
demonstrating a prevailing difference. Standing out as located in-
between dialect and standard (and in-between the landowning and
the working population) is Inspektor Brasig, whose use of Low Ger¬
man, High German and improperly applied foreign words, Fremdwor-
ter, has made him one of Reuter’s most endearing characters.
By concentrating on Brasig’s linguistic position between two so¬
cial groups, this charming character reveals, however, that he re¬
mains equally isolated from both factions despite his friendly stance
vis-a-vis both of them. Undoubtedly well-liked—everybody calls him
uncle—his imperfections in using High German seem reason
enough for the landowning population to giggle about Brasig, just
as the rural population amuses itself by Brasig’s desperate attempts
at appearing sophisticated. To a degree, one might speak of a dou¬
ble rejection, notwithstanding Brasig’s popularity. And while his re¬
jection is not the result of his efforts to translate from one language
to the other, it certainly exposes another instance of denied or failed
mediation between two languages.28 Brasig’s use of Messingsch thus
helps readers further understand, as Reuter develops it in this novel,
how language and cultural difference impact the relationship be¬
tween region and nation. The unchanged centripetal impact of the
standard language on the region is thus revealed as Brasig’s motiva¬
tion for his repeated use of High German and foreign words in a
discussion with the local farmhand Hawermann:
Mein gnedigster Herr Graf sucht freilich fur dem Hauptgute einen diich-
tigen Entspekter, aber, Korl, nimm’s mich nich iibel, du pafit dich nich
dahin. Stihst du, da muBt alle Morgen mit blankgewichs’te Stiewel un
ein Kledrock zum Apport un muBt mit ihm hochdeutsch reden, denn Platt-
deutsch hcilt erfor Ungebildetheit.'29
[My dearest count is of course looking for an efficient inspector for his
main estate, but, Karl, don’t take me personal (!), you don’t fit yourself
in there (!). You see, you have to come to retrieve with a dog (!) every
morning with polished boots and tidy clothing and you have to speak in
High German with him, because he sees Low German as a lack of education.]
Readers certainly recognize why an explanation of this English

translation of the Messingsch passage may be needed, for it is an at¬
tempt to translate literally the textual translation mishaps that take
place in the original. Brasig’s confusion of the dative and accusative
case (“fur dem Hauptgute” and “nimm’s mich nich libel”), a regu¬
lar event in Low German, and his mixing up of words such as Rapport
and Apport (a morning report vs. the act of retrieving by a dog) dem¬
onstrate the multitude of shortcomings in Brasig’s High German
and the amusement created by his language. The above English
translation of such a failed transition from dialect to standard may
not reproduce the outwardly comic appearance of the original, but
does reproduce at least the mix of proper and improper language.
The above translation and the original excerpt express more im¬
portantly the initial demand by Brasig’s Herr Graf to communicate
with him via a language other than the regional, the “uneducated”
dialect. Brasig is forced to give up his identity, as articulated through
the shared use of Low German, for another language, namely, the
language of a group of which he is not and likely will never become
a part. Brasig’s personal struggle with a fading identity, the result
of an order from above, is in this sense similar to Reuter’s personal
experiences in his autobiographic Festungstid, where his suffering re¬
peatedly culminates in accusations against centralized structures
that have robbed his identity.30 Even though Brasig’s up-beat person¬
ality and good citizenship would never allow him to voice such a loss
candidly, his linguistic confusion articulates it for everyone to hear
or read. It is therefore, in the end, not difficult to see how Brasig’s
effort to act as a mediator between two social, perhaps even cultural
groups, is at once a representation of his involuntary function of a
failed linguistic mediation between the two. The failure (or denial)
of Brasig to translate or mediate intraculturally thus appears as an¬
other step to articulate resistance through one’s own dialect against
the homogenizing and imperialist politics of a central and unifying
culture and language in Germany during the nineteenth century.
The Resilience of Difference
Uncle Brasig’s intriguing position in-between cultural differences

leaves us at perhaps the most suitable point from which to look back
at some of the relevant findings of this analysis of intracultural trans¬

lation in nineteenth-century German narratives. What appears most
significant in the use of translation is the repeated manifestation of
an inherent politicization and juxtaposition—implicit or not—of re¬
gional and national affiliations. The noted oppositions thrive on the
position of translations of dialect or standard German within a
shared cultural network, which is nonetheless constantly engaged in
a process of redefining its own contours and reconfiguring potential
realms for identification. Mediation between languages of particular
regions and/or the nation serves as a cipher for efforts to maintain
a sense of identity within a process that dictates sameness and aims
at eradicating difference. The intrinsic dynamics within the act of
translating present translation therefore as much more than just a
play with linguistic domains, as the case of Auerbach’s village tales
compellingly exemplified. Similar forces appear as well in instances
when the refusal of translation and the discussion of its failure take
center stage. This latter example was most prevalent in the episodes
taken from Reuter's works. Yet despite the narrators’ apparent ef¬
forts to articulate a dominance of dialect within one particular re¬
gion against the coalescing pressures exerted by High German, the
articulation of resistance became even more discernible when two
(or more) languages were placed side by side within one cultural
framework. Even if Auerbach and Reuter’s literary contributions to
a discourse on translation remain to some extent exceptional cases
of German literature, their articulation of translation strategies
within a common culture reveals much broader concerns, which
could also be relevant beyond German studies. Languages and me¬
diation between expressions of cultural belonging expose at the
same time difference and commonalities. This tension is often but
another device of articulating an individual’s strained position in-
between national and other realms of belonging as well as the need
to express an insistence on maintaining such individuality within the
whole. It might be accurate to conclude, then, that in the thematiza-
tion of sameness in the discourse on translation, this sameness turns
out to be only of secondary importance to regional literature. First
and foremost, the narratives are about the articulation of difference:
both linguistically and, more generally, in terms of their representa¬
tion of cultural, social, and political entities within a unifying Ger¬
man nation.
Notes
1. “Cultural turn” broadly entails a more pronounced awareness of the role of translation
in all areas of culture, including but not exclusive to matrices such as gender, religion, class,
and nation. See also Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam: Ben¬
jamins, 1995).
2. I cannot say in High German / That what rests inside my chest, / It is but partial
speaking / The best does not want to come along.” Alwine Wuthenow, Unterhaltungsblatt fur
beide Mecklenburg und Pommem: Redigirt von Fritz Reuter (1855-56; reprint, with a commentary
by Arnold Huckstadt, Rostock: VEB Hirnstorff, 1989), 30 September 1855, 108. Unless other¬
wise noted, all translations are my own.
3. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, From Addresses to the German Nation, quoted in John Edwards,
Language, Society and Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 26.
4. See for instance Russell Berman, The Rise of the Modem German Novel: Crisis and Charisma
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). As a response to Berman’s study, see my investi¬
gation of German regional literatures from which I draw some of the findings for this essay:
Arne Koch, ‘‘Local Voices of Poetic Realism: 19lh-Century Regional Literature and the Para¬
dox of German Identity, 1842-97” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 2001), abstract
in Dissertation Abstracts International 62, no. 03A (2001): 1038.
5. Two recent historical studies address the exchanges between regional localities and na¬
tional ideals: Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimal (Berkeley: Uni¬
versity of California Press, 1990) investigates the role of regional histories and historians
within the localized construction of nationhood, while Alon Confino, The Nation as Local Meta¬
phor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1997) examines the interrelationship between national and regional
memories and the convergence of the two within particular regions. Both studies provide im¬
portant insights for an understanding of coexisting regional and national identities, before
and after the unification of 1871. See also as an exemplary study of one specific German re¬
gion/estate the comprehensive volume by James Retallack, ed., Saxony in German History: Cul¬
ture, Society, and Politics, 1830-1933 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
6. See M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) and Homi K.
Bhaba, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1995).
7. See Clem Robyns, “Translation and Discursive Identity,” Poetics Today 15 (1994): 405-
28. Robyns’s notion of discursive identity rests on the central idea of delineating four possible
positions in the act of translation, which he divides into “four prototypical stances (imperial¬
ist, defensive, trans-discursive, and defective” (405). While Fichte’s notion may perhaps be
easily categorized as imperialist, that is, according to Robyns, as an “attitude in which other¬
ness is denied and transformed” (408), our discussion of intracultural translation reveals the
difficulty of assigning literary examples in such paradigmatic fashion to discrete categories.
8. Ibid.
9. See Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 262-65, for a more detailed introduction to speech
types and their contribution to heteroglossia in narration.
10. I introduce these additional three designations to further elaborate Robyns’s defensive
stance.
11. Jeremias Gotthelf, Die schwarze Spinne (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994), 8.
12. Theodor Storm, Aquis Submersus, in Samtliche Werke in vier Banden, ed. Karl Ernst Laage
and Dieter Lohmeier, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: Klassiker Verlag, 1998). Hereafter AS, cited in the
text.
13. Lilian R. Furst, All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1995), 129. Furst’s monograph is an excellent study in unveiling the pro¬
cesses behind achieving readability and comprehensibility through the reliance on readers’
aesthetic competence and the narrative’s use of referentiality in place of readers’ experience
and knowledge.
Donald Wesling, Mikhail Bakhtin and the Social Poetics of Dialect,” Papers on Language
and Literature 29 (1993): 303-22, outlines the enhanced impact of juxtaposing languages that
are in linguistic and cultural proximity to one another. He observes succinctly that often “the
least difference [i.e., the use of dialect within the standard language] has more significance
than there would be if another language entirely were used” (306).
15. See, for example, Paul Goetsch, “Vorwort,” Dialekte und Fremdsprachen in der Literatur,
ed. Paul Goetsch (Tubingen: Narr, 1987), 8.
16. This discussion will focus on cultural implications in the translation of language, while
one could certainly also already highlight the introduction of external laws as an act of transla¬
tion. In this manner, Neusa Da Silva Matte, “Translation and Identity,” Meta 41 (1996): 228-
36, defines translation “as a process that is based on the search for understanding between
different codes, cultures and epochs—[since it] can be seen as an act that initiates mediation”
(228). See also Iain Chambers, "Citizenship, Language, and Modernity,” PMLA 111 (2002):
24-31, who stresses the extent of U'anslation beyond language, namely, as informed by Walter
Benjamin's “The Task of the Translator.” as "a historical modality of cultural transformation”
(26).
17. Berthold Auerbach, Der Lauterbacher, in Gesammelte Schriften: Zweite Gesamtausgabe, 20
vols. (Stuttgart: Cottasche Buchhandlung, 1863), 2: 159. Hereafter GS, cited in the text.
18. For an early dismissal of language as an indicator of belonging to a nation or a commu¬
nity, see the renowned lecture by Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” trans. Martin Thom, in
Nation and Narration, 8-22. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1983), 134, is a more recent opponent of the
use of language as a key to define nations or other communities. Much like he warns of the
use of customs, Anderson observes that language “is not an instrument of exclusion: in princi¬
ple, anyone can learn any language” (Imagined Communities, 134). However, Anderson contra¬
dicts himself when at a different point he emphasizes “its [language’s] capacity for generating
imagined communities, building in effect particular solidarities” (ibid., 133). Language un¬
doubtedly promotes a process of imagining a community, whether it is on a national level,
promoted by the unifying language of the national print media, or on a regional level, pro¬
moted by another language and other sources, such as the more narrowly localized publica¬
tion edited by Reuter. See Unterhaltungsblatt. It appears that the capacity for language repre¬
sents a will to language, just like the performative act in the “will to nadonhood.” See Homi
K. Bhaba, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in
Bhaba, ed., Nation and Narration, 310.
19. See the excellent study on oral traditions in literature by Wolfgang Seidenspinner, “Or-
alisierte Schriftlichkeit als Sdl: Das literarische Genre Dorfgeschichte und die Kategorie Mtin-
dlichkeit,” Internationales Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte der Deutschen Literatur 22, no. 2 (1997): 36-
51. Seidenspinner stresses that the uses of dialects and ideolects allow an author to present a
group of speakers textually as a social and cultural unit (44).
20. Nancy A. Kaiser, Social Integration and Narrative Structure: Patterns of Realism in Auerbach,
Freytag, Fontane, and Raabe (New York: Lang, 1986), emphasizes the role of “officialese” as
follows: “The language of authority is a transgression of the sphere of village custom and
common dialect” (53).
21. The use of dialect by a particular character is not necessarily always accompanied by
the incapacity to read, speak, or comprehend High German. Auerbach provides textual evi¬
dence for this on several occasions. In Der Laulerbacher, for instance, the teacher discovers that
Hedwig does in fact read Hochdeutsch quite well, even though she uses dialect exclusively in
everyday situations (Gesammelte Schriften, 2: 185).
22. For an insightlful discussion of the range of contributing elements in creating a sense
of topographical identity or belonging, see Gerhard Hard, “ ‘Bewusstseinsraume.’ Interpretat-
ionen zu geographischen Versuchen, regionales Bewusstsein zu erforschen,” Geographische
Zeitschrift 75, no. 3 (1987): 127-48.
23. See Reuter’s letter to Robert Heller on 28 January 1862 in which he repeatedly objects
to Heller’s request for the rights to translate Reuter’s narratives into High German. Fritz Reu¬
ter, Gesammelte Werke und Briefe, 9 vols., ed. Kurt Batt (Neumiinster: Wachholtz, 1967), 8: 388.
Hereafter GW, cited in the text.
24. Kurt Batt, Fritz Reuter: Leben und Werk, in ibid., 9: 403.
25. Julian Schmidt, “Fritz Reuter,” Die Grenzboien Jg. 20 (1861), quoted in Fritz Reuter im
Urteil der Literaturkritik seiner Zeit. Rezensionen und Betrachtungen iiber die Werke und die Personlich-
keitFritz Reuters, ed. Arnold Huckstadt (Rostock: VEB Hinstorff, 1983), 112. It is indicative that
Schmidt speaks uniformly of Niedersachsen, or Lower Saxsons, in reference to the Low Ger¬
man-speaking parts without making any regional distinctions between writers from Mecklen¬
burg, Hamburg, or Schleswig-Holstein. In effect, this designation creates some sort of Pan-
Low German movement vis-a-vis a national-oriented Germany, which stresses further the idea
of creating sameness (all Low Germans) through an expression of difference.
26. See Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 275-T7.
27. Robyns, “Translation and Discursive Identity,” correctly observes the following: “The
simple fact that a text is written in something other than the common language is already a
radical challenge to the conventions of a target discourse” (407). The denial of translating
the High German verdict becomes as much a challenge to the common language (Low Ger¬
man) as a translation of dialect might have produced.
28. Friedrich Rothe, “Unkel Brasig: Zur nachrevolutionaren Erzahlkunst im 19. Jahrhund-
ert,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 42 (1969): 260-73,
describes Brasig as a mediator of sorts; however, he does not utilize this productive observa¬
tion for a broader sociocultural reading, but instead remains within its impact on interper¬
sonal issues.
29. Fritz Reuter, Ut mine Stromtid (Rostock: VEB Hinstorff, 1982), 32-33, emphasis added.
30. Michael Toteberg, Fritz Reuter in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Ro-
wohlt, 1978), 115, underscores Brasig’s identity crisis, as he now uses a foreign language that
was forced upon him by someone from the outside. An interesting connection offers Reuter’s
short essay “Ein Heimatloser in Mecklenburg” (Homeless in Mecklenburg) that he published
prior to his famed novels in 1856-57 in the periodical Die Grenzboten. The essay describes the
fate of a family that is deported from Pommerania to Mecklenburg and on to Prussia. After
six deportations and a repeated displacement, the family seeks temporary' shelter in a forest.
This story not only mirrors Reuter’s own personal odyssey through various prisons in Prussia
and Mecklenburg, but it also ends with a setting (the uncivilized forest) resembling an alterna¬
tive community within or in-between existing and competing structures. The phenomenon of
alternative communities has been investigated for another nineteenth-century writer, Wil¬
helm Raabe, by Jeffrey Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe: The Fiction of the Alternative Community
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). Sammons’s notion of alternative commu¬
nities is useful for gaining a better understanding of several other regional writers from the
1800s, including Theodor Storm, Adalbert Stifter, and Gottfried Keller.
Sacrificing Sense to Sound:
Mimetic Translation and Feminist
Writing
Luise von Flotow
University of Ottawa
W RITING about her work translating certain Cuban and Ar¬

gentinian writers, Suzanne Jill Levine describes wordplay, a
feature of her source texts, as follows: “Puns discover a coincidence,
a potential affinity, a homonymy already latent in language. They
place sound above meaning, and yet point to hidden semantic
bonds between words.’’1 In much experimental women’s writing of
the 1970s and 1980s, puns and other types of wordplay played a simi¬
lar role: focusing on sound, on coincidental sound connections, on
the effects achieved by playing on these affinities, on the sensory
stimulus and provocation such language use provides, and on the
way it can undermine assumptions of meaningfulness in more con¬
ventional language.
This aspect of recent women’s writing has been examined in some
detail, and problematized, by translators of the texts or those study¬
ing the translations.2 This is not surprising, since the complicity that
wordplay creates between a willing reader and the text is extremely
difficult to reproduce in translation. As Dirk Delabastita hedgingly
says in the introduction to a collection of essays on wordplay transla¬
tion, “wordplay (certain types of it more than others) tends to resist {to a
greater or lesser extent, depending on many circumstances) certain kinds of
translation.”3 Because of the way wordplay often resists translation,
it seems important to situate a translation and discuss the impor¬
tance of the ideological/cultural context which makes wordplay
translation more or less possible. My own work has examined strate¬
gies of supplementation and explicitation for wordplay—in the
translation of certain writers from Quebec4 and with regard to the
alleged untranslatability of American feminist wordplay in German,
specifically Mary Daly’s Gyn,/Ecology. In the latter case, I suggest that
91
some of the difficulty might lie in the differing political contexts:

German readers interested in such material were viewed as lagging
behind and thus unready for the “playful” aspects of Daly’s text,
which was held in awe, raised on a political and ideological dais and
explained for the target audience. The translation had a pedagogi¬
cal agenda, especially in regard to wordplay, for, as one of the trans¬
lator’s many footnotes claimed, German had not yet developed the
“neue Frauensprache” [new women’s language] that English had,
and this made wordplay translation almost impossible.
But there is another approach to wordplay translation in women’s
experimental writing. Michelle Bourjea, writing about a French
translation of Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva by Regina Helena de
Oliveira Machado, describes and justifies this approach as follows:
quelle ressource reste-t-il au traducteur de Clarice, si ce n’est celle d’aller

contre toutes les pratiques dominantes et de traduire seulement les mots tels qu ’en
eux-memes, dans ce qu ’its ont de plus concret, de plus ponderable, dans leur forme
comme dans leur sonorite? A present, c’est une sorte de leyon de mimet-
isme que nous reprenons a Clarice. Pour elle, les mots sont avant tout
matiere premiere sonore, leur musique, comme la musique instrumen-
tale, etant plus apte que le sens a capter l’inexprimable.5
[what option does the translator of Clarice have, except to counter all the
dominant practices and translate only the words in and of themselves, in their
most concrete, most physical aspect, in their form and their sonority ? This is a
sort of lesson in mimetics that we learn from Clarice. For her, words are
first and foremost a resource of sound; their music, like instrumental
music, is more likely to pick up what is inexpressible.]
In Bourjea’s view, Tispector’s writing is focused on sound, on the

musicality of the words, their form, their juxtapositions, a musicality
which is designed to express what has so far remained inexpressible.
And this writing demands a specific kind of mimesis in translation,
or what Bourjea terms “imitation phonetique.”6 The result is a text
that reproduces and/or riffs on the sound of the source version.
The idea that the sound of language and paronomastic play with
this sound is somehow more appropriate for writing “l’inexprima¬
ble,” or “l’inedit,” i.e., whatever dominant/conventional language
use can not express or has not yet expressed, pervades women’s ex¬
perimental writing of the 1970s and 1980s. Wordplay that uses
sound to expand meaning became an important instrument with
which to write this “inedit. ” Quebec writers, Nicole Brossard promi¬
nent among them, made extensive use of the device, inventing
countless “jeux de maux/mots” to name and describe women’s dif-
VON FLOTOW: MIMETIC TRANSLATION AND FEMINIST WRITING 93
ficult access to and position in conventional language. They chal¬

lenged women to find their “voix/voie d’acces a la parole,” produc¬
ing language experiments that demonstrated the gratuitous nature
of meaningfulness and the ease with which language conventions
could be undermined and abused. My first exposure to the problem
as a translator occurred when I foolishly agreed to translate an inter¬
view with Nicole Brossard on her book of fiction theory, Picture the¬
ory. In this piece, Brossard refers to writing in which there is nothing
existential at stake as producing “chats pitres tristement.”7 Subtly
sarcastic about the traditional organization of books, she plays here
with the coincidental sound connections between “chats pitres”
[cat clowns] and “chapitres” [chapters], and adds the disconcerting
adverb “tristement” [sadly]. I took the explanatory route, footnot¬
ing the wordplay. Other translators of this kind of writing have
worked in more experimental ways.
Mimetic Translation
Translators of paronomasia in experimental women’s writing have

occasionally resorted to mimetic translation, an approach that in¬
cludes Bourjea’s “imitation phonetique.” Levine considers this
strategy “the most radical means of recuperating puns perdus and
other dislocated dislocutions.” Citing Paolo Valesio, she describes
this approach as privileging “morphophonemic and syntactic rela¬
tionships between words in different languages at the expense of,
and in direct contrast with, lexical relationships.”8 It is a strategy that
favors the graphic and phonetic aspects of a text, focuses on sound
and on sound connections, and mimics/renders the sound of the
source text, rather than its semantic meaning. It radically alters but,
according to Levine, also “enriches” the original text. The enrich¬
ment occurs because the translation sounds foreign. Where tradi¬
tional translation practices “reveal a fear of the other, a need to turn
the foreign into the familiar” by seeking to reproduce the meaning
of the source text, or make a text meaningful in its new context,
mimetic translation strategies allow readers to experience the for¬
eign in their own language. At the same time, the strategy “calls into
question the possibility that any one translation suffices, or is inde¬
pendent of other translations of the same original.”9 Levine makes
relatively optimistic claims for mimetic translation: it is a strategy
that focuses on mimicking the sound and the formal, graphic as¬
pects of the source text not its semantic meaning, providing the
reader with the experience of the foreign in their own language and
challenging them. This, in turn, points toward the relative nature of

translation: the reader is made aware that there can always be an¬
other version.
Valesio makes other claims: mimetic translation, in which “the
form-meaning link is questioned, and . . . direct lexical reflection
is radically reduced, while morphonemic reproduction (mimesis) is
emphasized,” stretches the semantic content, and deforms it. This
deformation of semantic content “transforms the expected defeat
in the face of paronomasias into victory at a deeper level” by creat¬
ing interlinguistic paranomasias, wordplay across languages.10 He
bases this judgment on Celia and Louis Zukovsky’s innovative mi¬
metic translation of Catullus, a translation that according to its one
paragraph preface “follows the sound, rhythm and syntax of [Catul¬
lus’] Latin—tries, as is said, to breathe the ‘literal’ meaning with
him.”11 Their mimetic version of the American pronunciation of
Latin applied to the first lines of Catullus 32, a “lust poem” ad¬
dressed by the poet to his mistress, Ipsitilla, reads as follows:
Catullus:
Amabo, mea dulcis Ipsitilla

meae deliciae, mei lepores
Literal translation:
Please, my sweet Ipsitilla

My delights, my charms12
Zukovskys’ mimetic version:
I’m a bow, my dual kiss, Ipsitilla

my daily key, eye, my eye’s little leap-horse
Obviously, the mimetic translation does not set out to render seman¬
tic meaning first, but it does not produce gibberish either. If the
lines are read aloud, they show some correspondence to the sounds
of American/Latin while at the same time producing meaning that
Andre Lefevere has described as providing allusions to Catullus and
what he has come to stand for—the long-suffering lover, who is not
unwilling to drop the occasional obscene comment, a poet re¬
nowned for his mellifluous line, and so on.13
The famous French renditions of English nursery rhymes, Mots
d’heures gousses, rames by Luis d’Antin van Rooten and its follow-up
N’heures souris rames by Ormonde de Kay, also employ mimetic trans-
lation strategies. Ostensibly taken from ancient manuscripts found

in French chateaus, these texts are in fact phonetic imitations of
well-known children's rhymes, which make some sense as new texts,
and, when read aloud, clearly reveal the source text. Again, the
sound of the original text outweighs its semantic content, and the
translation produces new meanings, as the “explanations” ap¬
pended to the translations confirm. Yet, the translator’s ploy of
pointing out that when these verses are read aloud “in the sonorous,
measured classic style made famous by the Comedie Franyaise . . .
[they] assume a strangely familiar, almost nostalgic, homely qual¬
ity "14 reveals the playful purpose of this rewriting. The following ver¬
sion of “Baa baa black sheep” from Mots d’heures gousses, rames, fol¬
lowed by the translator’s explanations, is a good example:
Papa, blague chipe

A vieux inoug houle*
Y est-ce art? Y est-ce art? Trepas que se foulent**
Aune format masure, en nouant format theme***
En nouant fleur-de-lis de bois de solive en delienne.****
*Stealing, even in fun, my father, can disturb a mature man to unheard-

of depths. Note how houle, the swell and stir of the sea, is used in a highly
poetic simile.
** “Where is art?” We are dealing with total destruction.
*** Huts are built of alders or wattles, tightly forming the theme.
**** Knotted fleur-de-lis carved in old beams after the manner of Delos.
As Shakespeare said, “So may the outward shows of earth be least them¬
selves, the world is still deceived with ornament.”
Here the poet cries anathema to cheap builders and cheating contrac¬
tors. (#36)15
Here, the entire translation plus explanatory footnotes is an interlin-

guistic wordgame, an exercise in cleverness and panache, designed
to amuse.
Is Valesio’s “victory at a deeper level” achieved by either of these
mimetic versions? Certainly the semantic content is deformed and
interlinguistic paronomasias are created when the text is read aloud
by bilingual readers. But neither translation actually deals with
wordplay; instead, they create it through the effect of the source text
sounds underlying the translated text, which, in turn, call up a cer¬
tain source text meaning.
In the case of the Catullus translations, critic Paul Mann has as¬
serted that the Zukovskys’ “radical departure from tacit method¬
ological boundaries of translation practice serves to demonstrate
just how restricted those boundaries are.”16 Mimetic translation can,

in fact, play a reflexive role as a “cas limite” for translation, demon¬
strating how other translation strategies continue to turn the alien
into the familiar. Most of these other strategies, based on some con¬
cept of fidelity, where translation produces as faithful a representa¬
tion of the source text as possible, do not include fidelity to sound
(and are defeated by wordplay based on sound). Mimetic transla¬
tion, as practiced by the Zukovskys and evident in the “n’heures
souris rames” [nursery rhymes] cited above, on the other hand, fo¬
cuses on sound; it “doesn’t reject representation, [it] refocuses it.. .
[it] experiments with fidelity, and attempts to redefine or expand its
held.”17
Applied to Catullus, an author who has been translated many
times and into many languages before the mimetic version of his
poems was produced in 1969, this translation approach may well be
an enrichment. “Meanings” of Catullus’ texts had already been es¬
tablished by earlier, more traditional, versions. Similarly, the work
on Mother Goose rhymes (Mots d’heures gousses, rames) is a playful
linguistic enrichment—interestingly, both works date from late
1960s USA, a moment or “instance of enunciation” which may have
welcomed such experimentation. In the case of experimental wom¬
en’s writing of the 1970s and 1980s, there were no earlier versions,
however; there were no already established meanings that might be
enriched by mimetic translation. Why was this approach relatively
widespread in Canadian translation practice, and relatively suc¬
cessful?
The “Sonorous Plot” of Feminist Writing in

Quebec and Mimetic Translation
Much discussion about and translation of experimental Quebec

texts was published in the journal Tessera, cofounded and edited by
four anglophone francophile women academics, writers, and trans¬
lators: Kathy Mezei, Barbara Godard, Gail Scott, and Daphne Mar-
latt. Their first publication, piggybacking on the more established
Room of One’s Own (1984), includes a transcribed conversation in
which these editors address the oral/aural aspects of contemporary
women’s writing. For them, the experimental writing coming from
Quebec, and beginning to be reproduced in English-speaking Can¬
ada, was better received orally: “for the uninitiated [it is] probably
easier to listen to than it is to read: it’s true for a lot of women’s
texts.”18 Part of the “anthropological” reasoning for this is that
women’s communication has traditionally been oral, and the Tessera

editors backed up this idea with the text-based explanation that
“there’s so much rhythmic and melodic play happening that anyone
who is not used to hearing language, and most readers aren’t, won’t
pick it up” (T, 17). The idea that the sound of the text is an essential
part of its meaning, and will carry it even though “the allusions, quo¬
tations, echoes working through it” make it too dense to read, and
“so impossible, so difficult, to translate” (T\ 16) doubtless underlies
the mimetic approach that was taken by certain translators con¬
nected to the journal, explored and published in its pages, and ac¬
cepted by publishers, and since, republished. In other words, there
was a consensus among influential (and bilingual) women academ¬
ics and translators with the mandate to bring certain kinds of Que¬
bec writing into English Canada that it was desirable to privilege
sound over sense, or view sound as sense. In fact, the consensus
seemed to be that although this was difficult material, “when they
[people] hear them [the texts], suddenly they’re not difficult” (T,
17). It is noteworthy, of course, that as in the Catullus and nursery
rhyme examples above, translators were dealing with poetic mate¬
rial, where the rhythms, the sounds, the materiality of the text on
the page have a strong impact on meaning.
Translations to Listen to
Translator Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood describes a situation

where the aural reception of such a translated text was very effective:
the bilingual delivery of Brossard’s text “Sous la langue” at the soiree
des murmures (an evening of readings of erotic texts held at L’Espace
Go, the women’s experimental theater in Montreal). “Everyone was
there,” she writes, and they stood around the author/reader team
“in a semi-circle, in what seemed like a gesture of homage.”19 In this
complicit atmosphere her translation with its focus on the “sounds”
rather than the “sense” of the languages was very welcome. It read:
Does she frictional she fluvial she essential does she in the all-embracing
touch that rounds the breasts love the mouths’ soft roundness or the
effect undressing her?20
as a translation of:
Fricatelle ruisselle essentielle aime-t-elle dans le touche a tout qui arron-

dit les seins la rondeur douce des bouches ou l’effet qui la deshabille?-1
In French the “elle” sound at the end of “fricatelle,” “ruisselle,”

“essentielle,” both underscores the feminine context/content of
the text and creates the neologisms “essentielle” and “frica¬
telle”—a variation on “fricarelle,” 1930s slang for the sound made
by thighs rubbing together, says the translator’s footnote. Further
the oo sound connoting physical pleasure is carried through the text
by “dans le ttmche a towt,” and “la rondeur dowce des bouches ou,"
enhancing, and perhaps even creating meaning through sound.
The English translation also focuses on sound as meaning, and
avoids an explanatory or pedagogical mode, by using the pronoun
“she” to reproduce the feminizing effect of the “elle.” Even the soft
vowel sounds are reproduced in “rounds the breasts love the
mouths’ soft roundness.”
Translator Barbara Godard also describes such a group situation
for one of her mimetic translations (she uses the term “ventriloquist
translation”) of an excerpt from Brossard’s Amantes. Godard’s trans¬
lation (Lookers) was completed in 1981 for a public reading in To¬
ronto where Brossard and American feminist theorist, essayist, and
poet Adrienne Rich were to appear together, and the translation re¬
flects this situation. Godard consciously “sacrificed sense to sound”
to make “the poetry sound as much like Brossard’s as possible, leav¬
ing interpretive subtleties for written versions.”22 A closer look at the
translated poems shows that while sound was indeed an important
aspect, the translation is otherwise quite literal.23 The first poem in
the cycle entitled la tentation is an example:
j’ai succombe a toutes les visions

seduite, surface, serie et serieuse
en toute mobilite et paysages
concentree sur chaque episode
territoire et joue. masquee/demasquee:
out of space ou pleine d’intonations
dans le climat, delirante autour
de toutes les figures, aerienne
dans l’emploi du verre et du verbe
[I succumbed to all the visions
seduced, surface, series and serious
in all mobility and landscapes
concentrated on each episode
territory and cheek, masked /unmasked:
hors d’espace or full of intonations
in the climate delirious around
all the figures, aerial
in the use of glaze and phrase] 24
The translation follows the source text very closely, making no at¬
tempt to explicitate. The only obvious departure from a literal ren¬
dering is the last phrase “dans l’emploi du verre et du verbe” [in
the use of glaze and phrase] , where “glaze” does not render the
meaning of “verre,” and “phrase” does not strictly translate
“verbe,” but where the assonant effect of the English reflects the
alliterative effect of the French. In the brief article that accompanies
the translation, the translator points out that this gives some of the
“meaning” and all of the sound of “verre et verbe,” a strategy she
also uses elsewhere in the cycle of seven poems.
Other sound effects also signal the orality of Brossard’s French
texts to an anglophone audience. In the segment above, the English
fragment “ out of space ’ within the French original is signaled by a
literal translation of that fragment into French “hors d’espace”; in
subsequent poems other, similar, fragments are also rendered in
French. This creates a sound effect similar to that of the source text.
Whether a fragment of French in the English text has the same polit¬
ical or ideological value is rather debatable though.25
In the two cases described above, the translators produced text
for a public event, where sound effects were deemed important, and
where a complied audience was expected to appreciate the work—
aurally. Both translations were rendering what was viewed as “ma-
tiere premiere sonore.” The translations were addressed to listen¬
ers, not readers. Yet mimetic strategies are also implemented in the
published versions of these texts. These are driven by the “sonorous
plot” of experimental feminist writing.
Translations to Read
The concept of the “sonorous plot” has been ascribed to Nicole

Brossard, and described as a weave that is created when “one pho¬
neme leads by homophony to the next” and “the sound of the
words, not their syntax, make the textual connections.”26 Starting
from a source text that privileges sound over sense, the translator
must “follow the trajectory of a phoneme,” “rewrite the echoes,”
“connect blocks of thought, words, by their sounds.”27 This focus
renders the translation literal on the one hand, since there is little
room for interpretation of a text based on sound; yet, since the
sounds of English provide different connotations, the translation
triggers different associations and interpretations. At the same time,
the focus on sound lands the translator in a dizzying situation since:
Each word here is important in itself yet is only one instance in the web
of prose. Each word, each group of words, is used again and again with
new wo ids, the words making new contexts for the word, the phrase.
These are “sonorous liaisons” confounding two words, linking one
sound after another in the spiral which turns around and around on
itself.28
This entry from a translator’s diary describes the vertiginous effect

that such language can have on the focused reader. While this effect
may cause a certain anxiety through its confounding spiral of ten¬
sion, certain translators in 1980s Canada pursued texts and tech¬
niques that plunged them into the world of translating sonic effects.
In 1989, when the Tessera collective brought out its special issue
on “La traduction au feminin/Translating women,” this privileging
of sound over sense was again addressed in many of the articles. The
set of five translations and accompanying comments based on a
poem by Lola Lemire Tostevin provide a good example. This poem
reads:
espaces vers vers oil?

vers quoi?
cette rupture qui donne lieu a une syntaxe

qui se veut peau sur laquelle se trace un
autre sens (une sensation)
A travers le silence (les pulses travaillent en silence)

l’organisme se renseigne sur ses elements exterieurs
(tes yeux ta voix tes mains) la memoire d’un toucher
ou s’inscrit l’au-dela d’une langue tout en inserant
de nouveaux fragments oreilles neuves pour une musique nouvelle29
This poem, too, underscroes the focus on sound, and on the

senses, with its “memoire d’un toucher” and its fragmentary text
designed for “oreilles neuves pour une musique nouvelle.” It is elliptic,
allusive, yet in exploiting topoi of feminist writing of the time—
peau/syntaxe/tracer un autre sens/la memoire d’un toucher—a
focus on the sensual feminine/female experience and its expres¬
sion, it clearly speaks to a certain group of complied readers.
All five translators enter into dialogue with the poem and its au¬
thor and the French language, as Kathy Mezei explains in her intro¬
duction to the journal. They all “hear” the word “vert” [green] in
the “vers” of the hrst two lines, and two actually translate “(green)
spaces.” Another “hears” the possibility of green, but decides
against it. Two mention the possibility of “vers” also meaning
“earthworms,” and all drop this (unpoetic) option in their transla-
tions. One emphasizes the “verbal music” of the poem which she
finds in the repetition of the polysemous “vers,” where “sound
teases out sense—the ear leads the mind in new directions,”30 and
although she toys with the idea of using the term “verdant,” she
opts to translate “espaces vers vers ou? / vers quoi?” as “spaces vers¬
ions con-verse? / m-verse?,” rifhng on the connection between
“vers” in French and the “vers” fragment in the English “versions,”
expanding the English, and producing an interlinguistic parono-
masic commentary on the fact of translation (on her version). The
bilingual (anglophone and francophile) nature of the journal Tes¬
sera is the perfect venue for such translation: here, an oral rewriting
of the source text.
The approach that creates interlinguistic wordplay is visible in
other “translations to be read” of the period. In Lovhers, Godard’s
translation introduces wordplay where theie is none in French: the
first part of the suite of poems in Amantes has to do with two women
exploring each other’s writing. It is punctuated by a refrain:
JE N’ARRETE PAS DE EIRE

EN CE JUIN DES AMANTES31
Each one of these phrases is translated as
I DON’T STOP READING/DELIRING

IN THIS JUNE OF LOVHERS32
The translation here expands on the French “de lire” and incorpo¬
rates into English the polysemous use of “delire,” meaning to de-
read/un-read and including the notion of the delirium attained by
un-reading conventional knowledge and texts, a topos in 1970s fran¬
cophone feminist writing. It creates a pun based on sound, derived
from French and nonexistent in standard English, using mimetic
strategies to enhance and foreignize the target text.
In the same book, Brossard’s use of the feminine possessive pro¬
noun “ma” after “espace”—“Tespace (ma) / par mi tous les ages, les
rides / versatiles de la femme inattendue” (A, 59), which may refer to
women taking over the masculine “espace” for female use—is trans¬
lated mimetically into English as “space (ma) / among all ages,
versatile / wrinkles of the unexpected woman’ (L, 63, 89), and footnoted:
“ma_-Japanese term for space/ma—possessive pronoun, feminine
gender in French” (L, 89). The translation repeats the sound,
points toward a cultural reference—here, the fact of grammatical
gender in French—and includes information about an interlinguis-

tic Japanese/French/English sonorous plot effect.
A final example, also from Lovhers, presents a fine moment of in-

terlinguistic paronomasia in the source text, and its translation: the
narrator of Amantes spends considerable time reading and com¬
menting on a text her lover has written. She “moves around in it”
to fully explore it:
je cherche en te lisant a me deplacer constamment dans tes mots, pour

les voir sous tous leurs angles, pour y trouver des zones d’accueil: m’y
lover, my love. (A, 18)
The fortuitous link between the English “my love” and the French
“m’y lover’’ [to coil around in something] is made visible and
played upon here. It expresses what the narrator wants to do with
the words of her lover—coil and loop around in them in order to
understand “my love.’’ In this case, the wordplay does not focus on
sound as much as it does on the coincidence of graphic similarities;
it is the juxtaposition of these terms that creates a special parono-
mastic meaning and presents a special challenge for the translation,
which reads:
in reading you I am constantly seeking to displace myself in your words,

to see them from all angles, to find areas of welcome there: m’y lover,
my love. (L, 24)
In this version, the interlinguistic wordplay of the source text is not

recreated in the translation, yet another kind of graphic dislocation
of language occurs as the cliche “my lover’’ is dismantled into a
pseudo-French “m’y lover.” And since dislocation of language is an
important focus of experimental writing of the period, the impact
of this translation strategy which focuses on graphic and sonic ef¬
fects while letting “meaning take care of itself” (L, 10) may well
have been similar to the impact achieved by the source text.
The “Instance of Enunciation”
There is a special challenge in reading mimetic translations.

When there is some familiarity with earlier, meaning-based, transla¬
tions of the same text {Catullus), or the subtext (English nursery
rhymes), the reading experience is doubtless different from that of
confronting quite new material.
With regard to the mimetic translations of experimental feminist

writing in Canada or elsewhere, there has been some criticism about
the translations not rendering the source text’s “communicative
value” nor functioning as a “mediation between the source text and
the reader of the target text.”33 This kind of translation has also
been described as producing an artifact of a feminist politics/poet¬
ics that reduces experimental writing by Quebec feminists to an in¬
tellectual game that can hardly find an audience “outside a tiny cul¬
tural elite,” which is already bilingual.34 It reproduces text—with
deliberate mistranslation, foreignizing syntax and semantics, and a
focus on sound rather than sense—for an inner circle, for those who
already know and appreciate the source text.
These translation practices seem to have been driven to a large
extent by the hope, expressed by the editors of Tessera, that experi¬
mental writing from Quebec might somehow encourage English-Ca-
naclian writing to become more innovative in its theory and prac¬
tice.35 Quebec writing was viewed as taking an avant-garde position
that incorporated internal political issues, innovative notions de¬
rived from immediate applications of French philosophical and psy¬
choanalytical writings, and the power of a close-knit community of
politicized feminist writers/ publishers /critics. Hence, translating it
was important: on the one hand, this writing would bring new life to
the more sociocritical “images of women” approach of anglophone
feminisms, and on the other, it would demonstrate the new, theoret¬
ical, directions of Canadian work—“more formal-oriented and
more text-oriented and language-oriented.”36 Indeed, there were
claims that the critical work in English that derived from the experi¬
mental work in French (work by Eouise Forsyth, Caroline Bayard,
Barbara Godard) constituted a kind of breakthrough in anglo¬
phone, even Anglo-American, scholarship on feminist texts. In the
same Tessera “conversation,” Godard asserts “people were doing it
(incorporating theoretical approaches) here, and it happened be¬
fore there were any visible signs of it coming from the Linked States
or from England.”37
All the more reason, then, to translate this material as literally and
“sonorously” as possible—and to accompany the translations by
“notes” that explained or justified or otherwise contextualized
these complex materials. These “notes”—prefaces, accompanying
texts, and footnotes—were the “domesticating” strategies that had
been excised from the actual translations and were implemented in
metatexts to allow translators to carry out their interpretive func¬
tions as new critics of a new writing. All the translators working on
the poem by Lola Lemire Tostevin, for example, include commen-
taries on the text. One locates Tostevin’s writing within the literary
context of “la modernite” in Quebec;38 another elucidates the inten¬
sive “work with language” in the poem, while yet another speculates
on her own precarious position as the translator of a text the bilin¬
gual author could well have written in either English or French. In
other words, the reader learns about the source text, source writer,
source context and is not confronted with the translation alone and
out of context. Translators such as Barbara Godard, Susanne de Lot-
biniere-Harwood, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei, thus also act as crit¬
ics, applying the new theoretical language in their own critical dis¬
courses around the translations. In a commentary that seems to
recreate aspects of this “fiction-theory” approach to writing,
Daphne Marlatt, for instance, describes her reading/rewriting of
Tostevin’s poem as:
the experience of simultaneity cross-echo scanned between two lan¬

guages in working with a poet who writes very much inside of both, even
in other poems together.39
Similarly, Godard’s “translator’s prefaces” to Picture theory and The

Tangible Word40 as well as her “Translator’sjournal” reproduce stylis¬
tic features of the source texts she is both translating and comment¬
ing on, and employ the source texts’ fragmentary, nonlinear style,
as she doubles back to “revisit” conceptual issues as they recur
throughout the text. The prefaces and explanatory texts, thus,
“echo” the source writing almost as much as the translations them¬
selves, and help create a complicit readership.
There was intense interest in this work in grassroots feminist pub¬
lications during the 1970s and 1980s.41 Founded in the wake of Inter¬
national Women’s Year (1975), journals such as Broadside, Kinesis,
The Radical Reviewer, and the more established La barre du jour/Room
of One’s Own, featured interviews with Nicole Brossard and transla¬
tions of her writing. This constituted not only a rare meeting of fran¬
cophone and anglophone culture in Canada but also of women writ¬
ers and readers. Within certain anglophone communities, Brossard
and other Quebec writers achieved considerable visibility and im¬
portance, which was enhanced by other work as editors, journalists,
and anthologists, and this visibility further justified literalist and
“mimetic” translation. Interested readers came to know what this
writing “meant”: they are an important part of the instance of enun¬
ciation that made mimetic translation of the “sonorous plot”—“la
matiere premiere sonore” of feminist writing—feasible.
Notes
1. Suzanne Levine, The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (St. Paul, Minn.:
Graywolf Press, 1991), 13.
2. Articles that touch on the issue of wordplay in translating women’s writing include:
Catherine Porter, “Translating French Feminism: Luce Irigaray’s Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un,"
Translation Perspectives III: Selected Papers, 1985-86, ed. Marilyn Gaddis Rose (Binghamton:
SUNY Press, 1987), 40-52; Michelle Bourjea, “Agua Viva: Au fil des mots. Analyse critique de
la traduction en franqais de Agua Viva de Clarice Lispector,” META. Translators’ Journal/Jour¬
nal des Traducteurs 31, no. 3 (1986): 258—71; Michelle Collins, “Translating Feminine Dis¬
course: Mediating die Immediate,” Translation Review, No. 17 (1985), 21-24; Barbara Godard,
Translator’s Preface, in Nicole Brossard’s Picture theory, trans. Barbara Godard (Montreal:
Guernica Editions, 1991); Luise von Flotow, “Mutual Pun-ishment? Translating Radical Femi¬
nist Wordplay: Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology in German,” Traductio: Essays on Punning and Transla¬
tion, ed. Dirk Delabastita (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1997), 45-66.
3. Dirk Delabastita, ed., Traductio, 8.
4. Luise von Flotow, “Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories,” Traduction
Terminologie Redaction 4, no. 2 (1991): 69-84.
5. Bourjea, “Agua Viva,” 263, emphasis added; my translation.
6. Ibid., 264.
7. The interview originally appeared in La NouvelleBarre duJour, No. 118-119 (1982), 193.
It was published in English in Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 47 (1983), 122-35.
8. Levine, Subversive Scribe, 15.
9. Ibid., 16.
10. Paolo Valesio, “The Virtues of Traducement: Sketch of a Theory of Translation,” Semi-
otica 18, no. 1 (1976): 61, 63.
11. Celia and Louis Zukovsky, trans., Catullus (Gai Valeri Catulli Veronensis Liber) (London:
Cape Goliard Press, 1969), preface.
12. This literal translation is taken from Andre Lefevere, Translating Literature: Practice and
Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992), in
which this poem serves as the centerpiece for a discussion of the problems encountered in
literary translation.
13. Ibid., 96-97.
14. Luis d’Antin van Rooten, Mots d’heures gousses, rames: The d’Antin Manuscript (1967; re¬
print, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), foreword.
15. Ibid., poem no. 36.
16. Paul Mann, “Translating Zukovsky’s Catullus,” Translation Review, No. 21-22 (1986), 5.
17. Ibid.
18. Barbara Godard et ah, eds., “SP/ELLE: Spelling Out the Reasons,” Tessera/Room of
One’s Own 8, no. 4 (1984): 17. Hereafter T, cited in the text.
19. Susanne de Lot'oiniere-Harwood, “Translating Nicole Brossard: Her Hand on a Book
Resting WTrile Our Bodies Obliquely,” Writing Magazine, October 1986, 36, 37.
20. Ibid., 37.
21. Nicole Brossard, Lovhers, trans. Barbara Godard (Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1986).
22. Godard, trans., Picture theory, 35.
23. A few years later, an editorial in the journal Tessera underlines this literalist strategy;
Kathy Mezei writes: “feminist texts (or highly experimental ones) seem to require quite literal
translations. That, or quite free ones. Lola’s poems, as do Nicole Brossard’s texts, invite this
literal rendering.” The reason Mezei gives again has to do with sound: she writes “I can hear
the French and Lola’s voice.” See Tessera 6 (1989): 18.
24. Godard, trans., Lovhers, 30. (Amantes, 67).
25. Kathy Mezei has discussed the problem of the translation of fragments of English in
French texts in “Speaking White: Literary Translation as a Vehicle of Assimilation in Que¬
bec,” in Culture in Transit: Translating the Literature of Quebec, eel. Sherry Simon (Montreal: Vehi-
cule Press, 1995), 133-48.
26. Barbara Godard, “Negotiating Relations,” Paragraph 17 (1995): 70.
27. Ibicl, 70-71.
28. Barbara Godard, “A Translator’s Journal,” in Culture in Transit, ed. Simon, 72.
29. Lola Lemire Tostevin (and translators), “Vers-ions con-verse: A Sequence of Transla¬
tions,” Tessera 6 (1989): 15.
30. Ibid., 20.
31. Nicole Brossard, Amantes (Montreal: Quinze, 1980), 11, 12, 20, 21. Hereafter A, cited
in the text.
32. Godard, trans., Lovhers, 16, 17, 18, 19. Hereafter L, cited in the text.
33. Evelyne Voldeng, “The Elusive Source Text,” Canadian Literature, No. 105 (1985), 138.
34. Robyn Gillam, “The Mauve File Folder: Notes on the Translation of Nicole Brossard,”
Paragraph 16 (1995): 12.
35. See Tessera/Room of One’s Own 8, no. 4 (1984).
36. “Conversation,” ibid., 9.
37. Ibid., 10.
38. See Tessera 6 (1989): 22.
39. Ibid., 19.
40. See Barbara Godard, “Translating, Translating, Translation,” preface to The Tangible
Word, an anthology of work by France Theort (Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1991).
41. This is described in Barbara Godard’s rebuttal of Gillam’s criticism; see Paragraph 18
(1995), passim; for Gillam’s criticism see Paragraph 16 (1995): 8-12.
Names in Annie Proulx s Accordion Crimes
and Close Range: Wyoming Stories and Their
Hebrew Translation
Sara Friedman
'Bob Joe," [Silvano] said quietly in American, burning with hatred for
Sicilians. “My name are Bob Joe. I work for you, please.”
“It’s these Pranken, these paws, that will build our farms and the town.
Let the name show the work of our hands” . . . “So call it Pranken,
then.” . . . but when they filed the papers at the county seat, the word
was written down as Prank. “If we called it Hande,” said Loats, “it would
have turned into Hand, a not bad name. But Prank? A joke. Your life
place becomes a joke because language mixes up!”1
The machine had killed a ranch hand years earlier in a rollover accident
at the weed-filled irrigation ditch—Maurice Ramblewood, or what? Ram-
bletree, Bramblefood, Rumbleseat, Tumbleflood? . . . Maurice Stumble-
bum . . . Morris Gargleguts.2
AMES—given, taken and forsaken—assume a central place in

JL ^1 the narrative structure of these two works through elaborate,
self-referential naming schemes comprising various types of meta¬
phorical and allusive names, odd-sounding names, and variant spell¬
ings. Cultural identity and conflict are refracted in names given to
characters; names parents give their children; renaming by oneself
or by others; nicknames; and place names. There are also real
names of places and historical figures, and, finally, copious glosses
and comments on the etymology, derivation, aptness, and implica¬
tion of the names. Nearly all the names elicit interpretation by differ¬
ent means of self-referentiality, until it becomes apparent that the
cumulative significance extends to the entire naming scheme.
One of the major concerns in literary translation is preserving the
foreignness of the source text and the source culture in the target
107
text without reducing it to the familiar. These two works posit a

source culture that is foreign to itself, dissonant, fragmented. It is
the purpose of this essay to examine translation’s ability to account
for this cultural representation.
In Accordion Crimes, a novel spanning one hundred years of immi¬
gration to America, the central motif of renaming attests to the immi¬
grants’ desire to assimilate into the perceived unity of American so¬
ciety and the often disastrous results, as well as to the denial of their
cultural identity. In Close Range, set in the American West inhabited
by unlovely and unlucky would-be cowboys, it is the density of odd and
metaphorical names that exposes the absurdity and randomness gov¬
erning their lives.
Although proper names are not normally translated, it is generally
acknowledged that meaningful names present a special problem
and might be translated in order to convey their characterization
properties and thematic import.3 While it might seem that translat¬
ing a name with an identifiable semantic component presents no
difficulty, there are nonetheless reasons for leaving it untranslated:
translators can choose to leave all proper names—both conventional

and meaningful ones—in their original form, thus leaving the foreign
cultural setting as an aspect of the “otherness” of the original text fully
intact and actually emphasizing it. On the other hand, they can also de¬
cide to translate those names that have a more or less equivalent form
in the target language, or indeed all names, naturalizing the whole no¬
menclature of a translated text and helping to integrate it into the cul¬
ture and textual habits of its prospective audience.4
Luca Manini suggests a twofold reason for the practice of not trans¬
lating names: 1) the risk of blunting the original cultural context
which the names evoke, by supplanting them with those recogniz¬
ably belonging to the target culture; 2) the difficulty involved in pre¬
serving ambiguity and allusions that resist reduction to identifiable
components.
In Proulx’s work, the semantic element in names is but a strand
in the “onomastic web.’’5 Even names with no semantic or allusive
significance accrue meaning and elicit interpretation in a herme¬
neutic circle whereby the parts can be understood only in light of
the whole and the whole only in light of the parts.5 The meaning of
the names, then, lies in the relation of the naming devices to each
other and to the other aspects of narrative structure, with different
stresses emerging in each work.
Naming as an act of creation proclaims the identity of a newly per-
FRIEDMAN: PROULX’S NAMES IN HEBREW TRANSLATION 109
ceived creature and claims it for a particular culture. The onomastic

paradigm “The Lord God formed man (Heb. adam, hence: Adam)
from the dust of the Earth (Heb. adamah)” (Gen. 2:6) illustrates the
literary and linguistic considerations at work in translating proper
names. Naming imposes a hierarchy: it is God who names Adam,
and Adam goes on to name Eve and the creatures in the Garden.
The idea of the indivisibility of name and bearer—change the name
and you change the person—has traces in that naming and renam¬
ing occur at stages of great moment in one’s life, starting with the
given name at birth. Renaming oneself is almost unnatural, under¬
taken only in times of radical change: marriage (and, somewhat dif¬
ferently, divorce) for many women; assuming a false identity; immi¬
grating to another country. In Judaism, the sick are traditionally
given a new name to hasten recovery, and every convert to Judaism
must choose a new name signifying the new affiliation (e.g., son of
Abraham, Sara); in fact, converting literary names into Hebrew
names, a prevalent norm in early modern Hebrew literature, has
come to be known as “converting the character to Judaism.” The
types of correctness of names, and the extension of the word/object
identity to all of language, is the subject of Plato’s Cratylus, which
leaves unresolved the question of the precise nature of people’s rela¬
tionship to their names.7 Traditional nontranslation of names per¬
petuates the biblical insistence on the indivisibility of name and
bearer and the Greek preoccupation with the “correctness of
names.” The uses of literary names, and especially the play of those
names considered ordinary and those that seem unusual, exploit the
tradition whereby no inference can be drawn from the content of
real-life names as to one’s personality, appearance, etc. It must be
pointed out, however, that even though people in nonhctional life
are not identified with the semantic content, intentional or tradi¬
tional, of their names, clearly real-life names and naming express
aesthetic values, ethnic origin, and cultural affiliation; furthermore,
real-life names often strike one as odd or evocative, even names in
one’s own culture, provoking interpretation or comment. Names
are translated, then, because they are significant, or not translated
precisely because they are significant.
Names can be metaphorical, based on semantic appropriateness,
as in Mero’s reaction to hearing his nephew’s name, Tick Corn—
and learning of his existence for the first time, after not speaking to
his brother for over sixty years: “ [he] thought, what kind of a name
was Tick? He recalled the bloated grey insects pulled off the dogs.
This tick probably thought he was going to get the whole damn
ranch and bloat up on it” (CR, 20). Names can be allusive: “In Au-
gust of 1946 a green-shaded lamp from Sears Roebuck arrived the

same day the wife bore their last child. She named the kid Aladdin”
(CR, 121), or ironically allusive: “a man with an eye patch and a lat¬
ticework of scars from the corner of his eye to his jaw that made his
face rigid and expressionless on one side. They called him Polio—
what, ‘Chicken? thought the accordion maker, but it seemed the
creature’s name was Apollo, someone’s sardonic joke” (AC, 35).8
The Polio/Chicken pun is made known to the reader through nar-
ratorial translation, which is the convention of representing speech
or thought in another language, for, despite the “he thought,” the
accordion maker thought in fact not chicken but polio, in Sicilian.
The reference to a “sardonic joke” makes the narrator’s interest in
the power of names explicit through commentary.9
These opening remarks suffice to indicate the prominence of
names in these works. But it is not enough to note the prominence
of names: they have to be understood in context, in relation to other
narrative features. Gerald Prince speaks of metanarrative signs
which point to the way the text attracts interpretive attention:
Metanarrative signs provide us with some specific connotations, they

make some symbolic dimensions explicit; they define the hermeneutic
status of some situations. On the one hand, then, metanarrative signs
help us understand a narrative in a certain way; on the other hand, they
force us (try to force us us) to understand it in this way and not another
. . . Given any narrative passage, metanarrative signs can thus indicate its
functioning in a series of codes. They can explain its linguistic, sociocul¬
tural, or symbolic meaning. They can point out that a certain behavior
or a certain state of things represents an enigma or a solution to that
enigma . . . whether they are detailed and precise or, on the contrary,
general and vague, whether they refer to linguistic units, hermeneutic
units, or cultural ones . . . Above all, metanarrative signs are glosses on
various parts of a text and on the codes underlying them . . . they par¬
tially show how a given text could be understood, how it should be un¬
derstood, how it wants to be understood.10
Renaming
A metalinguistic discussion among German immigrants to

America is such a metanarrative sign that directly addresses their
dual identity:
“Hyphenism?—what is this ‘hyphenism’ business?” said Loats . . . “This

is Roosevelt’s horse, he is riding it hard. He don’t like hyphens! Jesus
FRIEDMAN: PROEILX’S NAMES IN HEBREW TRANSLATION 111
Christ! He is concerned about German hyphen Americans. See here,

down here. He says, ‘some Americans need hyphens in their names be¬
cause only part of them have come over. But when the whole man has
come over, heart and thought and all, the hyphen drops of its own
weight out of his name.’” (AC, 76)
The following gloss on renaming, without explaining the name

itself, is a metanarrative indication of the cultural code underlying
the prevalent custom of immigrants changing their name. The natu¬
ral order is reversed here with the son, Karl Messermacher, renam¬
ing himself and giving his name to his father: “Messermacher
changed the family name to Sharp, following Karl’s example, for
Charlie Sharp found life easier than had Karl Messermacher” (AC,
85). While the connection between Messermacher [knife maker] and
Sharp is not explained in the source text, at least one of the lan¬
guages, the English, is understood; in translation (into a language
other than German, in this case), both sets of names are potentially
equally alien in the target text. In order for the target text reader to
follow through to the underlying cultural code—i.e., immigrants
find it easier to naturalize their names but they also try to preserve
something of the original meaning of their name—the names must
be explained.
In every chapter in Accordion Crimes, learning the language and
renaming are part of the immigrants’ struggle for identity. At first,
just off the boat, “Silvano experienced the helpless rage of the pris¬
oner of language. His father seemed not to notice.” It is this aware¬
ness that makes the eleven-year-old Silvano change his name, re¬
naming being not only a symbol of one’s determination to learn
local ways and language, but equally an attempt to change society,
to change others’ perception of the immigrant.11
Names can be doubly allusive: “at the feet of clay. Elsewhere
we print an advertisement... a mass meeting at the foot of the Clay
statue” (AC, 44): referring to the statue of Henry Clay, U.S. states¬
man (1777-1852), and to the verse in the Book of Daniel (2:31,32)
that gave rise to the expression feet of clay—“an unexpected flaw
in the character of a person of good repute,” as defined in Brewer’s
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. As a biblical allusion, the phrase might
be expected to have a ready-made Hebrew translation at hand, but
the Book of Daniel is in Aramaic, not Hebrew, and the verse has not
produced a similar expression in Hebrew. The meeting—“Come
prepared for action,”—has been called following the acquittal of an
Italian in the killing of chief of police Henessey in New Orleans, part
of the labor struggle between the Irish and the Italians in the city.
After the lynching of eleven Italians by the mob, among them

Silvano’s father, the accordion maker, Silvano’s anger turns toward
his father: “He despised his father for being dead. A hardness began
to form in his chest, a red stone of hatred, not for Americans but for
the foolish, weak Sicilian father who had failed to learn American
ways and let himself be killed” (AC, 50). What renaming reacts to,
more than the injustice of prejudice, is the immigrant’s own anguish
over cultural affiliation.
Names resonate. They relate to the other narrative aspects and to
each other: Dolor Gagnon is an orphan from Random, Maine (real
and hctive place names in the scheme will be discussed below). He
knows his name is French, but that is all he knows of his past. He is
summoned by the director of Birdnest, the orphanage, after other
children make fun of his name: “Hey, Dollar! You must be rich! give
me some money!” “Doughnut! Hey, Doughnut, how’s your hole!”
(AC, 157).12 The director, Mrs Breath (her own name can be both a
metonymical reference to the palpability of her exhalation, and a
metaphorical one to the way she alters Dolor’s life with a mere utter¬
ance) tells him: “You know, I think it would be better for you if you
had a regular boy’s name. Which do you prefer, Frank or Donald?”
‘Frank,’ he whispered.” (Could it be the call of the unconscious
making him prefer the Gallic Frank to the Celtic Donald?) “And so
he was renamed and another fragment of self fell away like a flake
of rust” (AC, 158). He enlists in the army as Dolor Gagnon and in¬
vents a girlfriend he can dream about, carrying around a picture to
show people. The name he chooses for her is, appropriately, Fran-
cine—however, the Hebrew for France is tzarfat, of biblical deriva¬
tion (1 Kings 17:9; Obad. 1:20), which cancels the visibile morpho¬
logical similarity of France and Francine,13 Following his discharge,
Dolor returns to Random, where he runs into an old schoolmate,
Wilf, nicknamed Winks. Wilf’s wife, Emma, who speaks French, asks
Dolor:“You know what your name means?” “No, what?”. . .
“Douleur—pain■ J’ai une douleur dans lesjambes—my legs hurt.” “It’s
true,” he said. “They do hurt” (AC, 172). His search for his roots
and French music takes him up to French Canada for an evening of
accordion playing:
All over the room people were nodding their heads, prancing their fin¬
gers on the table, swaying and clicking their teeth in rhythm with the
cuilleres, the os, the pieds of the accordeonistes, until the tables were cleared
away and dancing began.
He was in a room of French people . . . He felt a curious thrill. It be¬
came the great night in his life, the one he later pulled up from sub-
merged dreams though the memory was flawed by a phantasm assump¬

tion. He believed that on that evening he had understood and spoken
French. (AC, 183)
The narrative voice is multilingual, some characters, bilingual,

and others don’t speak any one language: “Don’t drink the Wasser”
(AC, 82). Since we are told, for instance, that Dolor knows no
French—the French words interspersed in the description, above,
of his heady encounter with French accordion music, are clearly the
narrator’s.
The explanation of Dolor’s name, mediated through the French,
links the names to another prominent device in Accordion Crimes', the
foreign words in seven languages interspersed in the English narra¬
tive. These are the languages spoken by the immigrant characters,
with a mimetic effect of the way immigrants interject words and
phrases in their mother tongue when speaking in English. (This
habit is played on in the pseudo-Sicilian words faito and baccausa that
are understood to derive from “fight” and “backhouse” [out¬
house], italicized as if they were Sicilian.) The interspersed foreign
words create a dialectic of similarity and difference that obtains spe¬
cifically for English and the languages that influenced its develop¬
ment or that were influenced by it. Following the explanation of Do¬
lor’s name, the English reader might recognize “dolorous” and
“doleful.” Some words in French or Spanish, for instance, are mor¬
phologically similar to English and therefore recognizable. In He¬
brew, with its different alphabet (although influenced by English in
other ways), obviously this dialectic doesn’t obtain. In the target lan¬
guage, it is this relationship, of English—English per se, not simply
as source language—to these other languages that must be ex¬
pressed, without substituting whatever relationship the target lan¬
guage might have with English.
Dolor wakes up one morning to And that his legs are paralyzed.
After a long time he recovers and marries “Anne-Marie, who called
herself Mitzi” (AC, 191), a nickname chosen presumably because it
isn’t French: she hates anything “Frenchie” and implores Dolor to
go back to Frank, Frank Gaines. His reply: “I don’t change my name
to Gaines. Frank, OK, but Gagnon stays. The only thing I got of my
people is that name” (gagner—to gain, win). Whatever Dolor gained
from refusing Gaines is not enough: he kills himself.
Alienness and self-alienation are evident in the fragmentation of
the very form of the novel into eight chapters, each with different
characters entirely, a different family of immigrants. Only an object,
the accordion, symbol of immigrant wistfulness, survives the ravages
of immigration and the passage from one chapter to the next.
Changing yet preserving a name comes to a point in the following

passage that reveals the motives of a militant antimeat, anticattle¬
men activist: “Wade Walls’s breathing magnified. He was exultant,
charged with the rush of destruction, the hidden self emerged,
Wade Walasiewicz, avenging son of an assembly line butcher, his
father the head boner . . . dead at forty-two from some malignant
infection” (CR, 243). The pronunciation changes (Polish VAH-deh)
but not the spelling, whereas the two pronunciations require differ¬
ent transliteration in Hebrew, altering the duality in unity of the
name in the source text.
These works evince a move from the rightness of a name to the
right to name. In the Relampago family, who “had been American
citizens since 1848 and still the Anglo Texans said ‘Mexicans’ ” (AC,
98), the children are given a Spanish name and an English one:
“The daughter went by two names, answering to Betty from her
mother’s mouth, Felida from her father’s” (106), except for one.
Named after his drowned grandfather, “Crescenscio, already de¬
feated by his name” (107), is drafted into the army and killed, not
in action but in a ridiculous accident, which the family learns about
from an officer’s letter informing them about “Crisco, as everyone
called him” (119). The mother is ambitious for her children to suc¬
ceed in America and demands “^por que you kids don’t talk Ameri¬
can?” (106); but her son Baby rejects the suggestion that he could
become a famous musician: “Yeah? And change my name, like An¬
dres Rabago to Andy Russel? And Danny Flores to Chuck Rio? Like
Richard Valenzuela to Ritchie Valens? Na, na, na” (131).
The right to name, and the cultural affiliation naming proclaims,
is summed up by “Hieronim Przybyzs a.k.a. Harry Newcomer”: he
“learned that to be foreign, to be Polish, not to be Anerican, was a
terrible thing and all that could be done about it was to change
one’s name and talk about baseball” (AC, 256-57).
Odd and Symbolic Names
Names are not always elucidated by an explicit metanarrative sign;

a description can make the name clear without a gloss. Mrs Freeze
is “a crusty old whipcord who looked like a man, dressed like a man,
talked like a man and swore like a man, but carried a bosom shelf,
an irritation to her as it got in the way of her roping” (CR, 153); she
has a shotgun and she knows how to use it. Other names refer to a
personality trait or show how characters are assimilated into their
physical surroundings: the Sicilian agent who finds work for penni-
FRIEDMAN: PROEILX'S NAMES IN HEBREW TRANSLATION 115
less immigrants for a commission, “a man who called himself

Graspo—Grapestalk” (AC, 28; there is also a musical agent, Mrs
Grab, in AC, turning the use of grasp-grab into an extended naming
device); and in the same semantic held—-John Wrench, who seizes
other men’s women; Dirt Sheets—a cowboy too broke to afford a
pair of socks; Ray Seed—a farmer; Sutton Muddyman drives a mud-
speckled pickup; Elk Nelson—elk hunting figures in many of the sto¬
ries.
Even names that do not refer to any personality trait or circum¬
stances are odd: Lamb, Mrs Astraddle, Mr Bob Ladderrung, Maps-
ton Hipsag, Carver Stringbellow, Olga Buckle. Close Range, espe¬
cially, abounds with odd names: Hondo Gunsch, Leecil Bewd—“god
save the one who said Lucille” (CR, 48); Como Bewd, Dig Yant,
Hulse Birch, sisters Renti and Roany, Horm Tinsley, Dunny Scotus
(Duns Scotus, thirteenth-century theologian whose name gave rise
to the word dunce); Ash Weeter, West Klinker, Ottaline Touhey, Lee-
land Lee and his wife Lori Bovee, Ed Egge, Llyby Amendinger,
Noyce Hair (pronounce it). The oddness of the names has been
noted: “The very names are bony”; “Even the names of the charac¬
ters evoke the stinted world of these stories.”14 The truncated,
skewed names reflect the physical as well as the emotional and intel¬
lectual state of the characters: “two cowboys, Rick Fissler, straight
out of the box and needing assembly, and Noyce Hair, right half of
his face puckered with scars” (CR, 232).
These names have a primary oddness in the source text that is dis¬
tinct from the secondary oddness associated with any translated
name, which the reader habitually attributes to the source culture.
And they only partly overlap the category of a character “ridiculed
by the very sound of his name.”15 These names are significant not
through allusiveness or semantic aptness, or even due only to indi¬
vidual strangeness, but through cumulative oddness, in a hermeneu¬
tic circle: the odd names accrue meaning in light of the cultural
alienation in the whole, and the whole is understood in light of the
odd names. Although there is nothing “there” to translate, no se¬
mantic element hence no ambiguity, and no allusion, the primary
oddness of the names in the source text makes manifest a source
culture that is dissonant, foreign to itself. It is this self-alientation, to
be distinguished from the foreignness of source culture vis-a-vis tar¬
get culture, that translation seeks to account for.
The West in these stories is a cultural enclave with rules of its own,
a place where Diamond Felts tells his driving partner on the rodeo
circuit “if bulls could drive you can bet there’d be one sitting be¬
hind the wheel right now” (CR, 68): the “you” is Pake Bitts, who
laughs uproariously when his name is misspelt on a rodeo billing, a

mistake not all that much funnier than his “real” name: “How did
they spell your name?” “c-a-k-e. Cake Bitts. Nance’ll laugh her head
off over that one” (AC, 76).16
Diamond Felts, his promising name notwithstanding, is deter¬
mined to become a professional rodeo cowboy despite his mother’s
wishes for him to go to college and “get out of the mud” (CR, 49).
She lashes out with the worst insult she can come up with: “You’re
just like him, and that’s no compliment” (50) referring to the hus¬
band who walked out and left her with two small children. In his
rage, all Diamond answers is: “Don’t call me Shorty.” What he really
wants from his mother is a name, the name of the father. Following
a very close brush with death in the rodeo ring, he calls his mother
at two-thirty a.m. with the question “Who was my father?” “Shirley
Custer Felts. You know that” (77). The name he gets—not that he
believes the answer—incorporates local geography and history: Shir¬
ley, name of the Wyoming mountain ridge, and Custer, Civil War
cavalry hero, although the father deserts his own battlefield with the
only horse, a tiny logo on his suitcase, and forbids the child to call
him Dad.
The distinction set up between characters named by an implied
author and those named, so to speak, by their parents produces nar-
ratorial visibility different from commentary. Names reflect parental
hopes and an attempt to impose order on a chaotic world, as in the
pairs of twins Diamond/Pearl, Car/Train, Ideal/Pet, Lucille and Lu-
cette (they have a brother Lucien); the double naming in the Relam-
pago family, noted above; and the following names of nine brothers
in a list which juxtaposes metaphorical, allusive and unusual names,
and variant spelling (the innovation of a variant spelling—-Jaxon,
Lori, Jeri, Nikole, in Close Range—is a way of partially breaking with
tradition while preserving the sound of the name): Jaxon, the twins
Ideal and Pet, Kemmy, Marion, Byron, Varn, Ritter, and Bliss” (CR,
99). These are the “brass-nutted boys” of Isaac “Ice” Dunmire,
“whose sudden passage from bachelor to family man . . . from broke
cowpuncher to property-owning rancher, earned him the nickname
of ‘Thicker,’ which some uneasily misheard as ‘Trigger’ ” (CR, 99)—
four names in two lines. His wife, Naomi, may have had high hopes
for her sons, but after being “ridden hard and put away dirty” she
runs away with a cook-pan tinker and all the children are left with is
hatred of her and the memory of her smiling as she pours boiling
water on writhing rattlesnakes. Car and Train Scrope are also misno¬
mers. Their names reflect parental hope of progress, yet Train goes
nowhere fast by committing suicide, and his brother Car is left stran-
ded without any explanation, just that “Train’s name could not be
mentioned, that much he knew” (CR, 151).
Untranslated, significant names revert to the conventional
strangeness of any name in a translated text. Introducing a variant
spelling in the target language system shifts the cultural statement
to the target culture; using the Hebrew for diamond and pearl, car,
and train would cause a head-on collision of conventions: that of
leaving names untranslated, and that of consistency. A translator
may choose to translate a one-dimensional naming scheme: for in¬
stance, characters named by colors.17 In Proulx’s work, however, the
naming scheme is multilayered and complex. The sheer profusion
of names—names rather than characters, as many characters are re¬
ducible to their name—as well as the metanarrative preoccupation
with names, the cultural implications, the primary oddness whereby
names accrue significance not individually but in light of the whole,
shift the focus from the question of whether to translate names, or
how, to the poetics and the production of meaning in source and
translation.
Once the incremental signification of names is remarked, inter¬

pretation carries over to names that at first seem neutral: Mr More,
the teacher who sexually abuses his pupil, Felida, always wanting
more from her—“and it was the same thing the chalky cold fingers
going up her neck and into her hair” (AC, 121); Ruth Wolfe—a de¬
mure name coupled with a predatory one, for a member of the
threesome of heavy-drinking, brawling women who go out on the
town for girls’ night and “act wild” (CR). A name that seems to lack
a semantic element altogether may disclose one: Scrope comprises
rope, the instrument of death that leaves Scrope, in the final sen¬
tence, staring into space, “ill-balanced on his sloping mudbank”
(CR, 184).
The characters themselves are at times not unaware of their own
situation. Ottaline knows that she lives on a ranch “too far to every¬
thing” (CR, 128), and a few heart-to-hearts with a wrecked tractor
leave her emotionally unsatisfied. She knows a wrecked tractor is not
an ideal companion for a young woman, even if she is overweight,
and fears her problems might have a genetic etiology: “Her moth¬
er’s brother, Mapston Hipsag, had contracted a case of lumpy jaw
from the stock and the disease took him by stages from depressive
rancher to sniggering maniac“ (CR, 130). One particularly bad day,
Ottaline confides to her mother, Wauneta:
“It seems like somebody is making fun a me.”

“Who? Who is makin fun a you?”
“I don’t know. Somebody.” She pointed at the ceiling.

“Well, let me tell you, that Somebody makes fun a everybody. Some¬
body got to be laughing at the joke. Way I look at it.” (CR, 134)
The Divine appellation is effected by narratorial capitalization. He¬

brew has no capitals, and names are not orthographically differenti¬
ated in any way: the conventional way of referring to God without
profanation is simply—the name [hashem].
The names of the lovers in “Brokeback Mountain,” Ennis del Mar
and Jack Twist, are allusive and suggestive: del Mar—an aristocratic-
sounding name evoking exotic parts, for a landlocked broke cowboy
who won’t even go as far as Mexico: “Jack, you know me. All the
travelin I ever done is around the coffeepot to find the handle” (CR,
275). And by renaming Jack: “Jack Twist? Jack Nasty. You and
him—” thus putting a label on her jealousy and suspicions, Ennis’s
ex-wife draws our attention to his “real“ name, Jack Twist, echoing
Oliver Twist and the Dickens tradition of meaningful names, though
Oliver’s name was picked at random in the orphanage and Jack has
a father, Jack C. Twist, but his death ends the Twist line, with a twist
of fate.
Cultural fragmentation and the power of names are explicitly
linked:
“Your oil rig is a fuckin crazy place,” said Coodermonce ... He was part
of the confusion, for on this rig worked Cuddermash, Cuttermarsh,
Coudemoch, Cordeminch and Gartermatch, all variations on the origi¬
nal name, Courtemanche. (AC, 221)
In Close Range, Ottaline tries to remember the name of a ranch

hand memorable chiefly for his absurd murder by a vindictive trac¬
tor because he jerked the clutch and didn’t check the oil.
The machine had killed a ranch hand years earlier in a rollover accident
at the weed-filled irrigation ditch—Maurice Ramblewood, or what? Ram-
bletree, Bramblefood, Rumbleseat, Tumbleflood? . . . Maurice Stumble-
bum? . . . Morris Gargleguts. (CR, 153, 158, 161)
Dickens, master in the tradition of meaningful names, made lists of

names:
Names were always magical for Dickens. We know that he collected them
in his notebooks, fussed over them in his manuscripts, and discussed
them endlessly with family and friends. He agonized espcially over the
names of his chief characters and the titles of his novels . . . That there
was a right name he had no doubt. It was the name that conveyed the
outward show and inward mystery of a character or a book, the name
which revealed and yet concealed.18
Whereas Dickens made lists until he hit on the right name, Proulx
leaves the list in the text as a metanarrative naming game. In transla¬
tion, the names in the first of these two lists are transliterated, leav¬
ing the craziness in the sound pattern. In the second, all the names
refer to the same person, and a semantic element in the name—a
semantic element as such, not the referent—is the basis for the allit¬
eration. This list is reproduced in Hebrew by deploying Hebrew real-
name structures on a continuum of real, plausible and parody
names hinging on bar, the common prefix meaning “son of” in
composite Hebrew surnames (back translation would yield Maurice
Stoneson, Cragson, Thomson, Barcode, Thorn-in-the-butt, Butt-out
[or Buttinsky], CRb, 110, 112, 116—though Morris/Maurice are or-
thographically identical in Hebrew).
The slide from actual to fantastic and back evidenced in the
names colors these works throughout, in the characters and their
predicaments: not the fantastic as a different world but as all-too-
real, as in this can’t be happening to me, I can’t believe it, or the rarer it’s
too good to be true.
Place Names
The juxtaposition of real and Active place names adds to the ques¬
tioning of specificity in translation. The colorful Western place
names in these works bear the imprint of Indian languages and
those of settlers of French and Spanish origin, and of the flora and
fauna, the winds and the very rock:
Years on years they worked their way through the high meadows and
mountain drainages, horse-packing into the Big Horns, Medicine Bows,
south end of the Gallatins, Absarokas, Granites, Owl Creeks, the Bridger-
Teton Range, the Freezeouts and the Shirleys, Ferrises and the Rattle¬
snakes, Salt River Range, into the Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra
Madres, Gros Ventres, the Washakies, Laramies, but never returning to
Brokeback. (CR, 271)
Aiming to preserve the source culture by leaving names untrans¬

lated paradoxically obliterates it, by reducing all the names to the
same level of difference in translation. It seems that an invented sig¬
nificant literary name, e.g., Coketown in Dickens’s Hard Times, or
Brokeback, if not translated must at least be explained so as to make

its thematic import accessible. However, the significance of Brokeback
is greater than the sum of its parts: it encapsulates the sadness and
poignancy as well as the unsentimental rough affection of the two
cowboy lovers. Turning it into a Hebrew name would sever its link
to the local tradition of names in which local geographical and his¬
torical strata are imprinted. The reconstruction har shibaron is of¬
fered in square brackets, comprising mount followed by the root
sbr = to break, which evokes the Hebrew popular phrase nishbar li,
meaning: to be sick of something, and the suffix -on as in Mount
Hermon. Some other place names in these works are: Baker, Bend,
Woolfoot, Greybull, Bayou Feroce, Prank, Random, Hornet, Crazy
Woman Creek, Mud Suck, Rabbitheels, Dead Horse Road, Mirage
Street.
The name of a town, Greybull, can indicate the economic and his¬
torical importance of bulls in the region; something about the emo¬
tional side of life there can be adduced from naming a bull, “rank
and salty, big as a boxcar of coal” (CR, 42), who nearly tramples Dia¬
mond to death, Little Kisses, or Kisses for short.
A brief mention must be made of another strand in the onomastic
web, nicknames, slang and invective, which are also notoriously hard
to translate: gink, cluckhead, marblehead, hunkie, Eyetalians, hei-
nie, polack, pakis, aye-rabs, wops, chinks, spies, Hebrews, Dutchies
(for Germans); cultural specificity is excacerbated here by outdated
slang.
Conclusion
Once the importance of the naming scheme for cultural repre¬

sentation is remarked, and the fragmented and multivocal nature of
the source culture evident, it seems impossible not to account for
the names in translation, for they are simultaneously part of the nar¬
rative and point to its explanation. There are strategies for translat¬
ing names, but, as noted above, the convention of not translating
names is very strong.19 It is nevertheless possible to add an explana¬
tion in square brackets in the text or in footnotes (ACb, Cftb), and
to elaborate in a translator’s essay (CRb). This leaves the signs to be
interpreted in the target text, the signs that produce meaning, with¬
out translating the names. The translation’s visibility is heightened
by explanations which allow the hermeneutic, social, and cultural
codes to be accessed. I wish to draw upon Gadamer’s insights on the
impossibility of understanding a text without the interpreter bring-
ing his own tradition and concepts to bear on it, the “fusion of hori¬
zons,'' that of the text and that of its interpreter, to create a wider
horizon of understanding. Gadamer speaks of the attempts at
“naive assimilation,” the “false romanticism of immediacy” of try¬
ing to get inside a text rather than using one’s own historical and
linguistic tradition to interpret it. “[T]o try to eliminate one’s own
concepts in interpretation is not only impossible, but manifestly ab¬
surd.”20 Gadamer speaks of time elapsed as providing a stimulus for
bringing one’s own concepts and traditions to the understanding of
texts. I wish to suggest that a different language can also provide
the stimulus; the language remove can provide a vantage point for
understanding the source text, for enabling double vision. The lan¬
guage difference includes the linguistic and literary tradition of the
target text. Far from using these to make a substitute for the source
text poetics, both traditions can be present in the target text.
Seung, in his discussion of Gadamer’s theory of the hermeneutic
circle, calls these two perspectives existential understanding and in¬
tellectual understanding: “in an existential understanding, one un¬
derstands another culture by living in it and adopting its perspective
in place of one’s own; in an intellectual understanding, one under¬
stands another culture from the perspective of one’s own culture.
An existential understanding of a culture involves only one context
or horizon, whereas an intellectual understanding of it involves
two.”21
Translation is a convention that allows a foreign culture to speak
in one’s own language. Acknowledging the convention by heighten¬
ing its visibility in order to enable understanding—leaving meaning¬
ful names untranslated, and explaining their significance, for in¬
stance, enables intellectual understanding—from the outside, not
from the inside.
Notes
1. Annie Proulx, Accordion Crimes (New York: Scribner, 1996), 51, 64. Hereafter AC, cited
in the text.
2. Annie Proulx, Close Range: Wyoming Stories (New York: Scribner, 1999), 130, 132, 137.
Hereafter CR, cited in the text. This essay is based on my Translator’s Afterword to the Hebrew
translation of Close Range: Wyoming Stories (Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 2001). Hereafter G7?b, cited
in the text. My translation of Accordion Crimes'N2& published by Zmora Bitan in 1999. Hereafter
AC b, cited in the text.
3. See Luca Manini, “Meaningful Literary Names: Their Forms and Functions, and Their
Translation,” The Translator 22, no. 2 (1996): 161-78; Peter Newmark, Approaches to Translation
(Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1982), 70; Andrei Banta§, “Names, Nicknames, and Titles in Trans¬
lation,” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology (1994): 79-87; Susan Bassnett-McGuire, in Transla-
lion Studies (New York: Methuen, 1980) mentions the function of different forms of address
in Russian and the difficulty this presents in translation (118); Theo Hermans, “On Translat¬
ing Proper Names, with Reference to De Witte and Max Havelaar,” in Modem. Dutch Studies,
ed. Michael Wintle (London: Athlone Press, 1988).
4. Manini, “Meaningful Literary Names,” 171.
5. Gideon Tour)', following Nicolaisen, in "The Hebraization of Surnames as a Motive in
Hebrew Literature,” Proceedings of the XVIth International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, ed. Jean-
Claude Boulanger (Laval: Presses de PUniversite, 1990), 545-54.
6. On the hermeneutic circle, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Sea-
bury Press, 1975), 174; see also T. K. Seung, Structuralism and Hermeneutics (New York: Colum¬
bia University Press, 1982), 200, on Gadamer.
7. Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976) says of the Cratylus". “To be sure, the question the Greeks asked about the correct¬
ness of names is more a last echo of that word-magic that understood the word as the thing
itself, or better, as its representative being . . . indeed, Greek philosophy began with the disso¬
lution of such name-magic and took its first steps as a critique of language” (77). Roy Harris
and TalbotJ. Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saus-
sure (New York: Routledge, 1989), dismiss literal/literary reference to people’s names in the
chapter, “Socrates on Names”: “Cultures vary in their attitude to wordplay. The early Greek
delight in it will strike any reader accustomed to the norms of present-day Western education
as either rather oriental or rather juvenile. In particular, joking about people’s names is nowa¬
days regarded as unsophisticated (although not many generations ago, writers of the calibre
of Dickens still indulged in it)” (2). The present study takes a different approach from this
last to the narratological significance of names.
8. The glosses occur at different narrative levels: extradiegetical or intradiegetical; see
Shlomit Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction (1983; reprint, New York: Roudedge, 2002).
9. The preoccupation with names is shared by the characters and the narratological con¬
struct who names those characters in the first place. On narrators’ perceptibility, and their
attitudes toward the characters, see Rimmon-Kenan, ibid.
10. Gerald Prince, Narratology (New York: Mouton, 1982), 123-25.
11. Tour)', “Hebraization of Surnames,” makes the point that Hebraized names in He¬
brew literature are an attempt on the part of the immigrant both to change his own identity
and to change the way others perceive him (549).
12. In the Dolor-Dollar-money-(dough)-Doughnut-hole sequence, the fusion of meta¬
phorical and metonymical relations hinges on the phonological resemblance of Dolor-dollar,
progressing associatively to the semantic ambiguity of "dough” as metonymical synonym for
“money” and the stuff doughnuts are made of. The three capitalized members of the se¬
quence indicate that they belong to the set of proper names. The particular translation prob¬
lem here exemplifies Roman Jakobson’s dictum on the poetic function (which is not confined
to poetry): “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selec¬
tion into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the
sequence. “Words similar in sound are drawn together in meaning.” Roman Jakobson, “Lin¬
guistics and Poetics,” in Language in Literature, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987), 71, 86.
13. The opposite problem arises in the name Ziona, a common name in modern Hebrew
and the feminine form of Zion, meaning “Land of Israel”—with very different connotations
from those in “Governors of Wyoming” in Close Range, in which Ziona’s mother-in-law reads
Today’s Christian Ranchwoman.
14. See the New York Times: Richard Eder, 23 May 1999; Christopher Lehmann-Haupl, 12
May 1999.
15. Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, 68.
FRIEDMAN: PROULX'S NAMES IN HEBREW TRANSLATION 123
16. There is also a Harold Batts in the same story.

17. See Raquel Orgeira Crespo, "Problems in the Translation of Paul Auster’s New York
Trilogy, Babel 46, no. 3 (2000): 229-31.
18. Hemy Stone, “What’s in a Name: Fantasy and Calculation in Dickens,” Dickens Studies
Annual 14 (1985): 191. See also Philip V. Allingham, ‘‘Theme, Form and the Naming of
Names in Hard Times for These Times," The Dickensian 87, no. 1 (1991): 17-31.
19. See Newmark’s strategies in Approaches to Translation, 70-71, and Manini’s critique in
“Meaningful Literary Names,” 171.
20. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 361, 273, 358.
21. Seung, Structuralism and Henneneutics, 297.
“The Task of the Translator” in Garcia
Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude
and Brossard’s Mauve Desert
Monika Giacoppe
Ramapo College of New Jersey
HE title of Douglas Robinson’s 2001 study asks the question:

JL “Who translates?”1 This essay addresses that same question;
however, whereas Robinson’s work focuses on the translator’s sub¬
jectivity (or subjectivities), my attention is turned more toward atti¬
tudes toward the translator and his or her work. Is the translator per¬
ceived as a self-absorbed, incestuous outsider, a menace to himself
and others, as we see in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Cien anos de soledad
[One Hundred Years of Solitude]} Or “une heroine postmoderne,”2 a
necessary and salutary bridge between individuals and cultures, as
Sherry Simon concludes in response to Nicole Brossard’s Le desert
mauve [Mauve Desert]} Furthermore, how can the same activity gen¬
erate such radically different responses? This essay explores some
of the cultural and philosophical influences that shape Brossard’s
essentially optimistic view of translators and translation as well as the
more familiar one evoked by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Much of my thinking on this topic is inspired by Walter Benja¬
min’s famous 1923 essay, “The Task of the Translator,” an essay Ro¬
sanna Warren describes as “so hermetic that any number of transla¬
tors (not to mention poets, novelists, philosophers, and critics) can
extract almost any number of readings from it and come away satis¬
fied and nourished (or in despair).”3 This is because, rather than
offering any practical pointers about the actual translation process,
Benjamin’s essay concentrates more on the “ends” of translation—
what we should translate, and why, and what should be our goals in
so doing. Benjamin’s greatest contribution in this essay is perhaps
his break with the traditional practice of evaluating translations in
terms of their “fidelity” to the original. Benjamin can propose this
radical break in thinking because he posits that neither the original
124
GIACOPPE: “THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR-’ 125
nor the translation is truly “meant” for the reader; the “essential
quality of art is “not statement or the imparting of information.”4
Thus, we must see both the writer and the translator as working co¬
operatively to express something that exists outside of the realm of
any one language.
For Benjamin, “it is the task of the translator to release in his own
language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to
liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that
work” (“XT,” 80-81). What exactly is this notion of pure language?
In defining it, Benjamin posits a “kinship” of languages dependent
on what he sees as their supplementary nature, because that kinship
is found “not in the similarity between works of literature or words,”
but rather
in the intention underlying each language as a whole—an intention,

however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is real¬
ized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other:
pure language. While all individual elements of foreign languages—
words, sentences, structure—are mutually exclusive, these languages
supplement one another in their intentions. (“TT,” 75)
Some critics find Benjamin’s concept of pure language odd, if not

downright troubling. Its implication of the existence of a transcen¬
dent signified has annoyed some postmodern scholars, but the
model at least has the virtue of liberating us from the traditional
metaphorics of translation, which are striking in their recourse to
the power dynamics of gendered and family relationships. This may
be a matter of less pressing concern to those people who do not do
translation than to those of us who do—although surely all literary
scholars are impacted by the status and practice of translation. But
for translators, those metaphors are the ways in which our work is
measured and described, and they are an unfortunate gauge of how
it is (or, perhaps, is not) valued. “Traduttore, traditore,” and “les
belles infideles”—these expressions retain their currency, despite
considerable growth and increasing complexity in the field of trans¬
lation studies.
And so on a recent rereading of Cien anos de soledad, I was struck by
the depiction of Aureliano Babilonia/Buendfa, the translator figure
whose incestuous drives propel him out of his solitude and push the
Buendia family toward their predicted end. My sense of uneasiness
about this depiction deepened as I read Anibal Gonzalez Perez’s
essay, “Translation and Genealogy in One Hundred Years of Solitude,”
which posits a certain metaphorical equivalence between translation
and incest.5 Gonzalez Perez’s argument is persuasive, and Garcia

Marquez certainly provides ample foundation for it within the text.
In fact, one could easily claim that the entire novel turns on two
points: the Buendia family’s fatal inability to avoid incest, and their
(correlated?) inability to decipher the manuscripts left by the wan¬
dering gypsy, Melquiades, until those manuscripts can no longer be
of any use. These two points are synthesized in the novel’s final pas¬
sage, surely one of the most powerful passages in literature: Aureli-
ano Babilonia/Buendia, the illegitimate last member of the
Buendia family line, suddenly divines that the parchments offered
“la historia de la familia escrita por Melquiades hasta en sus detalles
mas triviales, con cien anos de anticipacion” [the history of the fam¬
ily, written by Melquiades, down to the most trivial details, one hun¬
dred years ahead of time] .6 As Aureliano hastens to discover his own
fate:
Macondo era ya un pavoroso remolino de polvo y escombros centrifu-

gado por la colera del huracan biblico, cuando Aureliano salto once pagi-
nas para no perder el tiempo en hechos demasiado conocidos, y empezo
a descifrar el instante que estaba viviendo, descifrandole a medida que
lo vivia, profetizandose a si mismo en el acto de descifrar la ultima pag-
ina de los pergaminos, como si se estuviera viendo en un espejo hablado.
Entonces dio otro salto para anticiparse a las predicciones y averiguar la
fecha y las circunstancias de su muerte. Sin embargo, antes de legar al
verso final ya habia comprendido que no saldria jamas de ese cuarto,
pues estaba previsto que la ciudad de los espejos (o los espejismos) seria
arrasada por el viento y desterrada de la memoria de los hombres en el
instante en que Aureliano Babilonia acabara de descifrar los pergam¬
inos, y que todo lo escrito en ellos era irrepetible desde siempre y para
siempre porque los estirpes condenadas a cien anos de soledad no
tenian una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra. (447-48)
[Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun
about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when Aureliano skipped
eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts that he knew only too well,
and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it
as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page
of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. Then
he skipped again to anticipate the predications and ascertain the date
and circumstances of his death. Before reaching the final line, however,
he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it
was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by
the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment
when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments,
and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time imme-
GIACOPPE: “THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR” 127
morial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred

years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.] (447-48)
For Gonzalez Perez, a major factor contributing to this disastrous

outcome is the fact that:
translation, like incest, leads back to self-reflexiveness, to a cyclonic turn¬

ing upon one’s self which erases all illusions of solidity, all fantasies of
“pure language,” all mirages of “propriety,” and underscores instead
language’s dependence on the very notion of “otherness,” of difference,
in order to signify “something.” (“TG,” 75-76)
Although the self-reflexive nature of translation seems beyond de¬

bate, it should also be noted that this self-reflexivity is in the service
of a dialectic process that alters both self and other, both source text
and translated product. Why, then, should this process immediately
and emphatically be coded in negative terms by both Gonzalez Perez
and Garcia Marquez? This choice of analogy seems to be imposed
from without, rather than arising from within. Furthermore, “lan¬
guage’s dependence on the very notion of ‘otherness,’ of differ¬
ence,” may be seen as providing fundamental support for Benja¬
min’s theory of “pure language,” instead of proving its fantastical
nature. As John Johnston explains, “the notion of a ‘pure language’
selves Benjamin as a means by which to grasp the differential and
diacritical nature of all language, and the fact that the essential na¬
ture of language . . . only becomes visible in and through differences
in particular languages.”7 8
Yet the condemnation of Aureliano—indeed, of all translators—
stands. Interestingly, this condemnation is not grounded in the
quality of the translation work—some sort of analysis based on accu¬
racy or aesthetics. Instead, the entire enterprise of translation is pre¬
sented as being inherently morally questionable. The very process
of translation—indeed, the very desire to “commit” translation—
seem to mark the translator as untrustworthy. The only hope for
overcoming this characterization is through a total “surrender” to
the source language text, and it is when dealing with sacred texts
that the power relationships requiring this “surrender” are most
dearly shown. Robinson has schematized the logic surrounding
such translations in a succinct list of assumptions:
7. Translators who are unwilling to surrender utterly to the spirit of the

original are no translators at all, or only very had ones.
8. They are not only bad translators; they are bad people. The unwilling¬
ness to surrender utterly to the spirit of the original stems from sinful
pride and presumption, from a desire to advance oneself at the expense

of the holy original. (WT, 54)
The need for the translator’s “surrender” is proportionally re¬

lated to the stature of the source language text involved. The more
sacred or revered the text, the more essential the translator’s disap¬
pearance, and Garcia Marquez emphasizes the sacred stature of Mel-
quiades’s manuscript in several ways. Its prophetic nature; its origi¬
nal composition in Sanskrit; its many providential rescues from the
hands of would-be destroyers; the enduring reverence granted it by
certain Buendia family members over generations; the “biblical”
hurricane that overtakes Aureliano when he finally finishes translat¬
ing it: all are important markers.
Yet Aureliano does surrender himself to the text, and the out¬
come of his labors should qualify him as a “good” translator (if such
there can be). After all, the completion of his translation leads to
that most frequently sought-after of goals in translation, here made
ironically literal: the translator’s disappearance. Lawrence Venuti’s
words are uncannily appropriate to Aureliano’s situation: “the origi¬
nality of translation lies ... in self-effacement, a vanishing act, and
it is on this basis that translators prefer to be praised.”8 Although
there is no one left in Macondo to praise Aureliano when his work
is done, his “vanishing act” is an impressive one. Given the dreadful
“end” of Aureliano’s translation, and the negative characterization
of his work by Gonzalez Perez, we might conclude that Aureliano is
simply a “bad” translator according to the terms described above.
Surely he must have earned his fate. Yet, as we shall soon see, the
text clearly indicates that Aureliano doesn’t act on his own, but scru¬
pulously follows the advice and guidance given by Melqufades. The
question then follows: is there any way that Aureliano could possibly
have been a “good” translator for the text that he was given, one
that he did not even choose, but rather was chosen for him?
By asking this question, I do not mean to take issue with the com¬
mon interpretation of the parchments as a sort of national history
“foretold,” the fate of a colony/former colony determined by peo¬
ple outside of it. But I do wonder why the translation of a foreign text
should serve as the metaphor for this calamity, and why the transla¬
tor himself should be depicted as an individual whose actions pre¬
sent a danger to himself and others. (It is, after all, Aureliano who
initiates the sexual relationship between himself and Amaranta Ur¬
sula, neither of them aware that she is his aunt.) In fact, the incestu¬
ous, illegitimate Aureliano Babilonia/Buendia embodies many of
GIACOPPE: “THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR" 129
the fears typically associated with translation and translators. As Lori

Chamberlain has detailed, these fears are often expressed in gen¬
dered, sexualized terms. Building on feminist research that has doc¬
umented how creativity and male labor are often coded creative and
productive, while female labor is considered merely reproductive,
Chamberlain notes that “this paradigm depicts originality or creativ¬
ity in terms of paternity and authority.”9 The impact of this para¬
digm in the held of translation studies is especially great, given the
additional metaphoric significance of “fidelity” to the original in
this held—a fidelity also often coded in gendered terms. According
to Chamberlain:
For les belles infideles, fidelity is defined by an implicit contract between

translation (as woman) and original (as husband, father, or author).
However, the infamous “double standard” operates here as it might
have in traditional marriages: the “unfaithful” wife/translation is pub¬
licly tried for crimes the husband/original is by law incapable of commit¬
ting. Such an attitude betrays real anxiety about the problem of paternity
and translation; it mimics the patrilineal kinship system where pater¬
nity—not maternity—legitimizes an offspring. (“GMT,” 58)
This last point is the most important one here, because it explains
how, as Chamberlain has said, “what proclaims itself to be an aes¬
thetic problem is represented in terms of sex, family, and the state,
and what is consistently at issue is power” (“GMT,” 66). As long as
the discussion of translation remains mired in metaphors of kinship
and fidelity, the subordinate status of the translation itself will re¬
main a moral issue, and translators will remain menacing, untrust¬
worthy figures, because, as Chamberlain says, “translation . .. threat¬
ens to erase the difference between production and reproduction
which is essential to the establishment of power” (“GMT,” 66-67).
Although (or perhaps because?) he does not explicitly acknowledge
these issues of paternity, legitimacy, and power, Gonzalez Perez is
writing from within this metaphorics when he identifies translation
as an inherently incestuous activity. “Translation and incest both
share a transgressive nature,” he affirms, “both are ‘improper’ acts
that imply breaching the barriers between members of the same
family or between two languages” (“TG,” 75).
In this context, the depiction of Aureliano Buendia/Babilonia be¬
gins to make sense, and even the behavior of Melquiades starts to
seem less puzzling. The whole translation project with which he “en¬
dows” the Buendfa family seems like little more than a cruel hoax,
a perverse joke at their expense, with Melquiades himself acting as
an author so jealous of his text’s paternity that he prevents it from

being translated for a hundred years—until it is too late to be of use,
that is. In the epiphanic moment when Aureliano understands the
workings of the text, he sees that Melquiades
la habia escrito en sanscrito, que era su lengua materna, y habia cifrado

los versos pares con la clave privada del emperador Augusto, y los im-
pares con claves militares lacedemonias. La proteccion final . . . radicaba
en que Melquiades no habia ordenado los hechos en el tiempo conven-
cional de los hombres, sino que concentro un siglo de episodios cotidi-
anos, de modo de que todos coexistieran en un instante. (446)
[had written it in Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had
encoded the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus
and the odd ones in a Lacedemonian military code. The final protection
. . . was based on the fact that Melquiades had not put events in the order
of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily epi¬
sodes in such a way that they coexisted in an instant.] (446)
These lines raise the question of why Melquiades is “protecting” his

text from its intended audience. Why arrange for them to live in
such intimate contact with it, if its contents are to be shielded from
them? Why have Arcadio listen to the “chanted encyclicals” that
were “in reality the prediction of his execution,” while refusing to
help him comprehend them? This process of translation turns the
procedure into a curious game, one in which Melquiades alone
knows the rules and has access to the necessary resources.
Garcia Marquez describes how:
Como le ocurrio a Ursula con Aureliano Segundo cuando este estudiaba

en el cuarto, Santa Sofia de la Piedad creia que Aureliano hablaba solo.
En realidad, hablaba con Melquiades. Un mediodia ardiente . . . vio con¬
tra la reverberacion de la ventana al anciano lugubre con el sombrero
de alas de cuervo, como la materializacion de un recuerdo que estaba
en su memoria desde mucho antes de nacer. . . .
Melquiades le revelo que sus oportunidades de volver al cuarto esta-
ban contadas. Pero se iba tranquilo a las praderas de la muerte defini-
tiva, porque Aureliano tenia tiempo de aprender el sanscrito en los anos
que faltaban para que los pergaminos cumplieran un siglo y pudieran
ser descifrados. (390-91)
[As had happened to Ursula with Aureliano Segundo when the latter
was studying in the room, Santa Sofia de la Piedad thought that Aureli¬
ano was talking to himself. Actually, he was talking to Melquiades. One
burning noon . . . against the light of the window he saw the gloomy old
man with his crow’s-wing hat like the materialization of a memory that
had been in his head since long before he was born. . . .
Melquiades revealed to him that his opportunities to return to the
room were limited. But he would go in peace to the meadows of the
ultimate death because Aureliano would have time to learn Sanskrit dur¬
ing the years remaining until the parchments became one hundred
years old, when they could be deciphered.] (384)
Melquiades, in other words, becomes the guiding spirit whose inter¬

vention enables Aureliano to complete the translation, even coun¬
seling him about where in the town bookstore he can find the San¬
skrit dictionary and other resources he will need for the task. The
passage, with its images of the deceased Melquiades hovering watch¬
fully over Aureliano’s labors, evokes Robinson’s discussion of trans¬
lation as a kind of “spirit-channeling.” Robinson asserts that this
view of translation has often led to an authoritarian (as opposed to
a reader-response, “lectoritarian”) vision of the process:
The source author is the authoritative source of meaning; even in the

afterlife, s/he remains a supremely interested party who closely monitors
the dissemination of his or her work here on earth; the translator who
would do justice to this disincarnate but nevertheless watchful and con¬
cerned spirit must convey the author’s “true” “original” words and in¬
tentions exactly as he would want them to be conveyed. (W7] 42)
The need for such a “guiding spirit” to legitimize translations has,

of course, most often been recognized with reference to those texts
(like the parchments) deemed “sacred.” Accordingly, translators
who “submit to the necessary regimen of self-emptying and instru-
mentalization” paradoxically gain power by so doing (WT, 42). Yet
Aureliano receives no reward for his labors; rather, it is Melquiades
who will “go in peace to the meadows of the ultimate death,” con¬
fident in the knowledge that his wishes are being carried out. Mean¬
while, the project concludes with the death of the translator and the
destruction of the text—no unauthorized translation will ever sup¬
plant the manuscript provided by the mysterious gypsy.
Instead of considering Melquiades responsible for having with¬
held from the Buendia family the text that might have saved them,
however, Gonzalez Perez blames the translator for having done what
he was clearly meant to do. He faults the character Aureliano for his
“tragic and impossible search for transcendence in the manuscripts,
for a principle of perfect and coherent communication akin to Ben¬
jamin’s ‘pure language’ ” (“TG,” 75). Apparently, Aureliano should
have known better than to look for transcendence, although I’m not
entirely sure that we can even ascribe that motivation to him. Typi¬
cally, a translator knows the language of the text s/he chooses to
translate, and is able to understand it in the original, before begin¬
ning the labor of translation. Aureliano’s situation is most unusual
in that he is not sure of what he will discover when his work is done,
and thus has no established affinity for the contents of the docu¬
ment. He seems to be driven by an uncontrollable curiosity whose
source is hard to determine, but which appears to lie outside him¬
self. The motivations driving Aureliano are hardly clear, but they
offer a strong contrast to the situation we see in Brossard’s Mauve
Desert.
Much as Walter Benjamin proposed in “The Task of the Transla¬
tor” essay, Brossard sees the translation in this novel as existing in a
complementary relationship with the original. Ideally, this juxtaposi¬
tion of the two facilitates a striving to reach understanding through
something resembling Benjamin’s “pure language.” This book, si¬
multaneously one and three different narratives, has been described
by Simon as “la defense et 1’illustration” [the defense and the illus¬
tration] (TL, 84) of Benjamin’s thesis. The first section, a novella
entitled Mauve Desert, ostensibly written by a certain Laure Angstelle,
tells the story of a fifteen-year-old American girl, Melanie, who lives
in the Arizona desert with her mother, Kathy Kerouac, and her
mother’s lover, Lorna Myher. The middle section of the novel, “A
Book to Translate,” documents the labors of Maude Laures, a Cana¬
dian who, having found the original in a used bookstore, sets about
the task of translating it. We follow her step by step, as she does both
the linguistic and imaginative work necessary to reinvent the text in
another language, in other words. The book’s final section, “Mauve,
the Horizon,” represents the fruits of Maude Laures’s labors: the
translation of “Mauve Desert.” In the original novel, all three texts
are in the same language, French; thus the translation exists along¬
side the original, in a complementary relationship with it, much as
Benjamin had imagined.
Brossard does not leave us to guess at Maude Laures’s motiva¬
tions, as we must with Aureliano in One Hundred Years of Solitude. As
Simon explains, “a la source du travail de traduction est le desir, et
c’est ce desir qui soutient et que legitime tout ce qui suit” [the
source of the work of translation is desire, and it is this desire which
supports and legitimates everything that follows] (TL, 78). This de¬
sire is deeply personal and multivalent: physical as well as intellec¬
tual and emotional. Brossard remains within the realm of sexualized
metaphors with which translation is commonly described, but she
instills them with positive significance that exists beyond the realm
of conventional morality. We are told repeatedly that Maude has

been “seduced” by the text, and that the process of translation will
require a long and curious period of cohabitation, during which the
unfamiliar landscapes she has come to know through the text must
also come to live within her. She focuses on maintaining a balance
between the self-reflexiveness condemned by Gonzalez Perez and
the “self-annihilation” that Venuti cautions against, described here
as the “peur panique de se substituer a l’auteure de ce livre” [panic
fear of substituting herself for the authcr of this book] (57/53). She
sees her loyalty as due, not to the author, but to “ce qui, bien bas
sous la langue, voulait” [that which, under tongue, waited] (57/53).
Maude Laures’s relationship with the original author of the text
she is translating—a woman of whose life and/or death she knows
nothing—provides an instructive study in contrast when considered
alongside Aureliano’s ongoing “mentoring” by Melquiades. In this
case, the narrator emphasizes the translator’s proprietorship and
subjectivity: “La nuit, Maude Laures revait de son livre et le jour,
avant meme de s’adonner aux principes de l’audace et de la pru¬
dence, elle pensait a Laure Angstelle. Cela la rassurait de savoir
qu’elle etait libre de tout (imaginer) a son sujet” [By night, Maude
Laures dreamed of her book and by day, even before devoting herself
to the principles of daring and caution, she would think of Laure
Angstelle. Reassured by the knowledge that she knew was free of ev¬
erything (she could imagine) about her] (61/57). This freedom
does indeed allow Maude to imagine a single encounter with the
“spirit” of Laure Angstelle. In this “interview,” she takes on the
voice of Angela Parkins, the woman murdered, presumably by
the mysterious scientist known only as Longman, and admonishes
the author for having arranged her death. Upon returning to her
own voice, she confronts the author: “Je peux vous reprocher ce qui
existe dans votre livre,” she says. “De vous lire me donne tous les
droits” [I can reproach you for what is in your book. Reading you
gives me every right] (142/133). Not surprisingly, even the spirit of
an author conjured up by her translator still expresses qualms about
seeing her work transformed, “carried over” to another language
and culture, filtered through another subjectivity. The skeptical
Laure Angstelle asks: “Comment pouvez-vous me comprendre si
vous me lisez dans une langue et transposez simultanement dans
une autre ce qui ne peut adequatement trouver place en elle? Com¬
ment croire un instant que les paysages qui sont en vous n’effacer-
ont pas les miens?” “Parce que,” answers her translator, “les pay-
sages vrais assouplissent en nous la langue, debordent le cadre de
nos pensees. Se deposent en nous” [“How am I to believe for a sin-
gle moment that the landscapes in you won’t erase those in me?”
“Because true landscapes loosen the tongue in us, flow over the
edge of our thought-frame. They settle into us”].10
This metaphor of landscapes as a kind of immutable truth, “pure
language,” perhaps, informs the whole of the novel. For instance,
while theorizing about the process of her translation work before
she begins, Maude determines:
II faudrait aussi souligner ailleurs que la ou le sentiment l’avait surprise,

de l’etrange histoire arracher le sens et s’en tenir a l’acte ininterrompu
de l’interpretation. Le pourrait-elle sans confondre l’horizon et le de¬
sert, ces espaces venus, par effraction, se greffer sur son monde urbain
et sur les figures qui, en elle, ne toleraient pas de desastre? Pourtant, elle
acquiesfait avec un certain soulagement a ce livre qui sans preavis avait
sape son equilibre, l’obligeait a repartir son energie de maniere a in-
clure, optimale, l’alternative en chaque mot, terree. (58)
[She would also have to emphasize elsewhere the places where feelings
had taken her by surprise, from the strange story extract meaning and
hold to the uninterrupted act of interpretation. Could she do so without
confusing the horizon and the desert, spaces which, by breaking and en¬
tering, had come to graft themselves onto her urban world, onto the
figures which, inside her, tolerated no disaster? And yet it was with a cer¬
tain relief that she acquiesced to this book which without warning had
undermined her equilibrium, forcing her to apportion her energy so as
to include, optimal, the alternative in each word, buried away.] (54)
Her translation theory is remarkable for its insistence on both the

physical environments that she and the author inhabit, and for the
emotional impact that the text has had upon her. Her language, as
she continues, is reminiscent of Benjamin’s; Maude Laures invokes
the notion of translation as “une question de singularity pouvant
affranchir les mots de leur saturation. Tout avait pourtant ete possi¬
ble dans la langue de l’auteure, mais dans la sienne, il fallait qu’elle
s’arme de patience. Inepuisablement trouver la faille, le petit en-
droit ou le sens appelle quelques audaces. La beaute etait a ce prix
comme une esperee lumiere” [a question of singularity capable of
liberating words from their saturation. Everything had nonetheless
been possible in the author’s language, but in her own she needed
to arm herself with patience. Unfailingly find the fault line, the tiny
place where meaning calls for some daring moves. Such was the
price of beauty, like a longed-for light] (59/55). This translator is
attempting to uncover the “pure language” in Laure Angstelle’s
text.
It is thus significant that, as she commences her work, Maude

Laures imagines that Mauve Desert, the initial novella, is capable of
“s’expose a ce que soit reconstitute son intentionnalite” [having its
intentionality reconstituted] (66/62). Although Benjamin’s theory
of “pure language” and Brossard’s (idealized) vision of translation
are controversial, they are valuable because they encourage us to
move away from the old model of translation that posits a master-
servant relationship between author and translator. Other theorists
have come to the same conclusion, albeit by different routes.
Among the most famous of these is Mexican writer Octavio Paz. In a
1970 essay, Paz affirms that:
cada texto es unico y, simultaneamente, es la traduccion de otro texto.

Ningun texto es enteramente original porque el lenguaje mismo, en su
esencia, es ya una traduccion: primero, del mundo no-verbal y, despues,
porque cada signo y cada frase es la traduccion de otro signo y de otra
frase. Pero ese razonamiento puede invertirse sin perder validez: todos
los textos son originales porque cada traduccion es distinta. Cada traduc¬
cion es, hasta cierto punto, una invencion y asi constituye un texto
unico.11
[each text is unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another
text. No text can be completely original because language itself, in its
very essence, is already a translation—first from the nonverbal world,
and then, because each sign and phrase is a translation of another sign,
another phrase. However, the inverse of this reasoning is also entirely
valid. All texts are originals because each translation has its own distinc¬
tive character. Up to a point, each translation is a creation and thus con¬
stitutes its own text. (154)
The condition recognized here by Paz demands that we acknowl¬

edge yet another important concept enunciated in Mauve Desert and
One Hundred Years of Solitude: the fact that language is both arbitrary
and insufficient to describe or represent reality. “Le desert est indes-
criptible” [The desert is indescribable] (11/11) is the opening sen¬
tence of Mauve Desert, while the first page of One Hundred Years de¬
clares that, when the village of Macondo was founded, “El mundo
era tan reciente, que muchas cosas caredan de nombre, y para men-
cionarlas habfa que senalarlas con el dedo” [The world was so re¬
cent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them
it was necessary to point] (59/1). Later, during the insomnia plague,
it is clear that no intrinsic connection links words to the items they
designate, because the words themselves are so easily forgotten—
and that’s to say nothing of the growing irrelevance of political la¬

bels in the novel.
Furthermore, language is potentially dangerous, in its ability to
reveal and to conceal—yet our human condition compels us to use
it. For instance, despite initially recognizing that the desert is be¬
yond words, Brossard’s hrst protagonist, Melanie, continues to write
about it, in notebooks kept next to the gun in the glove compart¬
ment of her mother’s car. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the silence
and lies surrounding the massacre of banana workers in Macondo
provide further evidence of the dangers inherent in the use and
abuse of language. “En Macondo no ha pasado nada, ni esta pa-
sando ni pasara nunca. Este es un pueblo feliz” [“Nothing has hap¬
pened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing will
ever happen. This is a happy town”] (347/333), everyone tells Jose
Arcadio Segundo, the massacre’s sole survivor, until the false words
appear to trump the reality of the incident. The potentially explo¬
sive nature of language is further underscored in Mauve Desert
through the presence of a shadowy character known only as Long¬
man. His language of choice, like that of Melquiades, is Sanskrit,
and the complex equations in which he delights are weapons of
death.
In the novel, it is insinuated that Longman is responsible for the
hrst atomic bomb, as well as for the murder of Melanie’s hrst poten¬
tial lover, a woman named Angela Parkins. The implication is that
the murder is motivated by intolerance, and that Longman is dis¬
turbed by the sight of two women dancing together. In this sense,
Longman and his destructive drive signal an inability to cope con¬
structively with difference, to see difference as a positive force—
which is surely one of the aims of Mauve Desert overall. The names of
the “author” and “translator,” Laure Angstelle and Maude Laures,
which duplicate each other, highlight the novel’s appreciation of
sameness in difference, as does its focus on lesbian love—and it is
this precise quality that sparks desire. The novel’s lesbian relation¬
ships are surely meant to stand as a positive paradigm for transla¬
tion, or, as affirmed by Alice Parker: “translation can be read as alle¬
gorizing lesbian subjectivity.”12
But the translator’s desire invoked here is a far cry from the inces¬
tuous, self-reflexive desire that Gonzalez Perez sees in One Hundred
Years of Solitude. After all, translation requires at the very least a recog¬
nition of difference, a point which Brossard handles in a playful man¬
ner. Commenting on the novel in Mapping Literature: The Art and Pol¬
itics of Translation, Sherry Simon and David Homel note that “Nicole
Brossard’s writing is itself a doubled, transformational activity, call-
ing for translation which is also ‘transformance.’ Translation cannot

then be understood as a search for sameness. Like parody and quo¬
tation, translation is a kind of re-writing which at the same time cre¬
ates difference.”13 Furthermore, translation is typically inspired by,
at the very least, a sense of affinity, if not the strong sense of desire
described by Simon and Brossard. Ideally, it requires that the trans¬
lator incorporate an aspect, an element, of‘‘otherness” into him or
herself—and translator and text are both changed in the process.
‘‘We grow,” says Warren, “by welcoming difference, not by assimilat¬
ing it entirely to ourselves.”14 Or, as Christopher Middleton puts it
in “Translation as a Species of Mime”:
The need formalized in mime is a need to become one with that which is
not-self, that which is utterly beyond what self is or was. Mime actualizes a
desire for union with the “other.” It embodies more than contact with
the other, more than inclination toward it... A passionate love-relation
is perhaps the first real step toward an authentically poetic or dramatic
miming. Lovers will often mime one another. Lovers hope to achieve a
fullness of insight into the other person.
Middleton distinguishes “miming” from “imitation” because “with

mime, certain traces of the original may be implied in the act, but
the act itself is originative.”15 He sees in miming a “reciprocity” that
imitation lacks—the dialectic I earlier noted as a defining feature of
the translation process. As employed by Middleton, the sexual meta¬
phor used for translation escapes the “fidelity” trap, allowing us,
like Benjamin, to imagine the process as a creative act during which
the translator may have access to something that exists beyond both
the original and the translated texts.
Muriel Rukeyser, whose work as both a poet and a translator of
other poets (including Octavio Paz) equipped her to see beyond the
dichotomy that posits “writing” as creative and “translation” as re¬
productive, also followed this line of thinking about translation. She
saw the possibility and the necessity of allowing desire to move us
through language, to a place beyond language, where a different
kind of communication may happen. “For when you delve deep
enough into experience,” she says, “you come to a place where we
share our lives. And so in language there is something underneath
our languages which is shared and this is curious, this is subtle, this
is a secret, and also this is known to us.” Does this common fount of
human experience and emotion mean that translation will always be
successful? No, but translators and their cultures still benefit from
their good-faith attempts. As Rukeyser concludes:
I thought of all of us and what music we are trying to carry through and
out of what and how we have been willing to risk our terrible mistakes
and our terrible failures all the time, and go on making it and make it,
knowing it is about perfection, knowing that we cannot hope for it, it is
impossible, but we will go on doing it.16
Notes
My thanks to Ulrike Brisson and Giuliana Perco for their assistance.

1. Douglas Robinson, Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities beyond Reason (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2001). Hereafter WT, cited in the text.
2. Sherry Simon, “La traductrice, heroine postmoderne,” in Le trafic des langues: traduction
et culture dans la litterature quebecoise (Montreal: Boreal, 1994), 75-90. Hereafter TL, cited in
the text.
3. Rosanna Warren, ed., The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field (Boston, Mass.: North¬
eastern University Press, 1989), 4.
4. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1923), trans. Harry Zohn, in Theories of
Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 71. Hereafter “TT,” cited in the text.
5. Anibal Gonzalez Perez, “Translation and Genealogy in One Hundred Years of Solitude,”
in Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, eds., Gabriel Garda Marquez: New Readings (Cam¬
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 65-77. Hereafter “TG,” cited in the text.
6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cien ahos de soledad (1967; reprint, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe,
1984), 446. Translated as One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (1970; reprint.
New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 446. Hereafter these two editions will be cited in the text
by page references only.
7. John Johnston, “Translation as Simulacrum,” in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Sub-
jectivitiy, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 1992), 46.
8. Lawrence Venuti, introduction to Rethinking Translation, 4.
9. Lori Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation," in Venuti, ed.. Re¬
thinking Translation, 57. Hereafter “GMT,” cited in the text.
10. Nicole Brossard, Le desert mauve (Montreal: Hexagone, 1987), 143. Translated as Mauve
Desert, trans. Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990), 133. Here¬
after these two editions will be cited in the text by page references only.
11. Octavio Paz, “Traduccion: literatura y literalidad,” in Traducddn: literatura y literalidad
(Barcelona: Tusquets, 1971); translation here by Susan Bassnett-McGuire, in Translation Stud¬
ies (New York: Methuen, 1980), 38.
12. Alice Parker, “The Mauve Horizon of Nicole Brossard,” Quebec Studies 10 (1990): 109.
13. David Homel and Sherry Simon, eds., Mapping Literature: The Art and Politics of Transla¬
tion (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1988), 44.
14. Warren, ed., Art as Translation, 3.
15. Christopher Middleton, “Translation as a Species of Mime,” in Warren, ed.. Art of
Translation, 25, 26.
16. Muriel Rukeyser, “The Music of Translation,” in The World of Translation. Papers deliv¬
ered at the P.E.N. Conference on Literary Translation, New York, May 1970 (New York: P.E.N.
American Center, 1971), 188, 193.
The Death of the Authors
a.k.a.
Twilight of the Translators
Christi Ann Merrill
University of Michigan
For the old gods, after all, things came to an end long ago; and verily,
they had a good gay godlike end. They did not end in “twilight,” though
this lie is told. Instead: one day they laughed themselves to death. That
happened when the most godless word issued from one of the gods
themselves—the word: “There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god
before me!” An old grimbeard of a god, a jealous one, thus forgot him¬
self. And then all the gods laughed and rocked on their chairs and cried,
“Is not just this godlike that there are gods but no God?”1
let us note one of the limits of theories of translation: all too often they
treat the passing from one language to another and do not sufficiently
consider the possibility for languages to be implicated more than two in a
text. . . How is the effect of plurality to be rendered?2
I N an English translation of Roland Barthes’s essay, “La morte de

hauteur,” the text, referring to a narrative passage in Balzac’s Sar-
rasine, asks, “Who speaks in this way?” and goes on to wonder if it
was “the hero of the tale Balzac the man Balzac
the author universal wisdom? Romantic psychology?”3 And
just as the Barthes text asks this of Balzac’s text, we ask this of Bar¬
thes’s, Who is speaking to us this way? Is it Barthes the nuanced,
exacting reader performing his reading for us? Barthes the clever
stylist creating a gap between what he says and what he does? Barthes
not so much an Author but an Author-function, a name and a swirl
of texts, a body of scholarship accruing under the signature/signi-
fier called “Barthes”? The text then provides an answer: “We can
never know, for the very good reason that writing is the destruction
of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that composite,
139
that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white

where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body
that writes” (“DA,” 49). It’s only fair to ask first, Which body that
writes? Barthes the irreverent critic who wrote this essay in French
three decades ago? Or Richard Howard the translator whose name
never appears on the covers of books as an Author-function, even
though he has written the words I have just quoted?4 Or Stephen
Heath the translator who wrote the same essay and therefore the
same question—not in the present imperfect but in the present con¬
tinuous—“Who is speaking thus?”3
“Qui parle ainsi?” Speaking? We talk as if we hear a voice speak¬

ing in the present (be it imperfectly, or continuously). What is it that
seems to come alive for us? We are sure that there was a hand (or
two, or three) that wrote, past tense. And now we imagine a voice
that speaks, present tense. Speaks whose tongue? Barthes’s French
tongue, Heath’s English tongue, Howard’s American tongue—it’s
not just the hand that writes which becomes separated from this
voice we hear, but the very tongue that speaks. How can Barthes
claim that it is language speaking? If it is, language is speaking in
tongues.
No doubt it has always been so: once a word has been uttered,
written, or otherwise made manifest, it has already become a transla¬
tion, has already been incorporated into the world’s Babel.6 Book 11
of Genesis teaches us that the profusion/confusion of language is
an inherent, most sorrowful condition of man who longs for a tran¬
scendent unity the Fall has rendered impossible. “This story re¬
counts,” Jacques Derrida writes, “the origin of the confusion of
tongues, the irreducible multiplicity of idioms, the necessary and im¬
possible task of translations, its necessity as impossibility.”7 Thus, in
these post-Christ, post-Plato centuries we have been taught to be¬
lieve in the purity of the spirit of words, have been taught to mistrust
only the flesh of language and to look instead toward the Truth ani¬
mating it. That with divine inspiration reader and writer, speaker
and listener can rise above the confusion, to a unitary state above
Babel. In this view multiplicity is associated with earthliness—
therefore tainted, dangerous, carnal. The much-repeated Septua-
gint story reinforces this myth of centrality as purity, and the possi¬
bility of translation miracles: seventy-two translators working in
seventy-two separate cells were said to have created seventy-two iden¬
tical Greek versions of the Hebrew Bible in exactly seventy-two days,
word for inspired word.8 In the legend Philo recounts and August-
MERRILL: TWILIGHT OF THE TRANSLATORS 141
ine touts, language is made subservient to the voice of God they each
were fabled to have heard; since the time of Augustine authors but
most especially translators have been given the impossible task of
making language transubstantiate. The translators of the Septuagint
(as most that have followed) have remained anonymous because
what is crucial is not the body that writes but the voice that speaks;
and although this attitude may seem archaic and overly pious, when
we read Barthes’s essay in English translation (at a remove, we say,
from the “source,” the “original,” words usually forbidden to mod¬
ern and especially postmodern thinkers) we talk as if we do indeed
hear Barthes’s voice speaking to us. The translated words function
as mere impediments, impurities. But what if the fact of so many
tongues, so much confusion, were something to celebrate? For if
language speaks, it must speak in the plural.
In ethnographic societies—as Barthes dubs them—plurality of lin¬

guistic expression is expected and even encouraged. Individual per¬
formances are seen as temporal and arbitrary. What is believed to
endure is not the fixed performance per se, but the repeatability of
such a gesture. The “I” is an arbitrary sign which comes to life only
when someone utters it, so death is feared only when there is no¬
body to tell her version of the story, nobody to offer himself in the
subject position. Meaning is found not in the particular words or in
a voice beyond the words, but in the gesture to communicate at all.
This is not to say that there is no distinction between an excellent
performance and a less successful one. But such virtuosity is not con¬
fused with “originality” as if it were a manifestation of a singular,
divine presence. This is not a distinction between oral and written
cultures, nor between dynamic and fixed texts, but in what we look
for in a textual performance: whether we believe in a singular no¬
tion of truth, or multiple ones.
Indeed Howard’s version of Barthes’s essay urges us to think of

text not as a “line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning
(the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but of a multi-dimensional space
in which are married and contested several writings, none of which
is original” (“DA,” 52-53). Ironically, the tone affected suggests an
English-version Barthes who does not so much endorse this lack of
originality as rail against it. The essay voice claims that the “truth of
writing” is that writers are all “eternal copyists” fated to “imitate an
ever anterior, never original gesture,’ like Flaubert’s Bouvard and
Pecuchet madly trying to catalogue every cultural banality and cliche
(“DA,” 53). What does this mean that the essayistic construct we
think of as “Barthes” likens all writers to two fictional characters? A

text within an (incomplete) text, Bouvard and Pecuchet’s “Diction¬
ary of Received Ideas” (as it is called in Krailsheimer’s English trans¬
lation) is filled with entries made to look overly earnest and devoid
of insight, a showcase of “profound absurdity”—according to
“Barthes” (“DA,” 53). As readers we wonder alongside the essay
voices of Barthes and Howard: made to look absurd by whom and
for what ends? In the entry on “auteur/authors,” for example,
Bouvard and Pecuchet advise: “One should ‘know a few authors’: no
need to know their names.”9 Yet, because of the irony with wihch
this text is written, we are doubly aware of Bouvard and Pecuchet’s
unreliability as arbiters of such a question. In the space of this short
entry a whole scene emerges in our heads: Flaubert the author mak¬
ing polite conversation at a social gathering with members of the
bourgeoisie and hopefuls like Bouvard and Pecuchet. Fine wine,
perhaps, some cigars, fancy, understated clothing, silk upholstery. A
self-assured man in a dinner jacket makes the author remark rather
loudly, and while everyone takes it in, Flaubert catches our eye
across the room. This is the moment when we must take sides: do
we share his disgust and laugh an inward, bitter laugh with him, or
do we think this remark perfectly natural, and remain thankful that
in the future we can repeat this phrase, “know a few authors”—as
do Bouvard and Pecuchet—without having to think twice? Instinc¬
tively we side with our imaginary author; on some level we recognize
that the more earnest Bouvard and Pecuchet are made to sound in
their attempts to master current cultural fashion, the more surely we
are drawn inside the circle of savants marked by Flaubert’s cutting
humor.10 And yet, we do not think to imagine the figure of Krails-
heimer in the room as well, setting the scene so that we can imagine
catching Flaubert’s eye, even though it is Krailsheimer’s tongue that
narrates this English version of events. Likewise, we are taught not
to notice Howard or Heath in the room as Barthes holds forth so
earnestly on “the truth of writing” (“DA,” 53). Can we imagine
Howard or Heath laughing at the figure of Barthes just as we imag¬
ine Flaubert laughing at the self-assured man in the dinner jacket
Bouvard and Pecuchet quote? Or when we imagine Barthes pro¬
claiming writing “a multi-dimensional space in which are married
and contested several writings, none of which is original” (“DA,”
53), do we find ourselves nodding along like Bouvard and Pecuchet?
The anxiety at the root of either scenario is the same, as we search

for a single author (ity) behind the text when there could be several
as easily as there could be none. For the entry on “original,” the
fictional Bouvard and Pecuchet urge: “Laugh at everything that is

original, hate, jeer at it, and annihilate it if you can” (298/320).11
How do we decide what to laugh at exactly, and with whom? We
might imagine aligning ourselves with or against the figures of Bou¬
vard and Pecuchet, with or against the implied characters they bor¬
row from, with or against the figure of Flaubert who presents us with
fictional characters offering up unnamed references, with or against
Barthes who references Flaubert offering up these mimics, with or
against Krailsheimer representing Flaubert representing Bouvard
and Pecuchet referencing a questionable original, with or against
Howard or Heath representing Barthes referencing Flaubert et. al.
In yet another gesture of revealing authoritativeness, we hear
“Barthes” characterize “The Dictionary of Received Ideas” as “a
fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture”
and find ourselves wanting to agree with this single, compelling per¬
spective (“DA,” 53). With whom, or what are we agreeing? With lan¬
guage? In an entry so layered and bitter in its humor, the reader of
a Barthes text, like the reader of a Flaubert text, does not look for
the Author-God releasing a “single theological message” as much as
a fellow companion to laugh with or at in this roomful of chattering
voices—not so much the hand a writer wrote with (past tense) as the
body we imagine ourselves engaging with (present tense)—with the
mouth that smirks, the eyes that scoff, the stomach that chortles.12
This is a new definition of voice, one with a certain esprit very much
linked to the body. Which body then—Howard’s or Barthes’s?
We find ourselves caught in a paradox of conflicting desires. The

hapless Bouvard and Pecuchet’s concur; in their entry for “dieu/
god” they write: “Voltaire himself said: ‘If God did not exist, it would
be necessary to invent him’” (255/308). For “deicide/decide”:
“Wax indignant over it, even though the crime is somewhat infre¬
quent” (253/301). Sean Burke points out in The Death and Return of
the Author that “Roland Barthes in ‘The Death of the Author’ does
not so much destroy the ‘Author-God,’ but participates in its con¬
struction. He must create a king worth the killing.”13 Even Barthes
admits (in Howard’s translation of The Pleasure of the Text): “As insti¬
tution the author is dead: his civic status, his biographical person
has disappeared . . . but in the text, in a way, I desire the author: I
need his figure ... as he needs mine.”14 Just as we need the figure
of Barthes.
What would then prevent us from reading the death of the author
as neither funeral oration nor call to arms—as Burke terms it—but
as a facetious (funeral) parlor game aimed at getting a rise out of

(the dead) Lanson and his apostles? “Inhumation/burial,” Bouvard
and Pecuchet quip: “Too often premature. Tell stories of corpses
which had eaten an arm off to appease their hunger” (281/296)).
It is impossible to tell, for when we separate the hand that wrote
from the tongue that speaks, we can no longer recognize the belly
that laughs.
The essay asserts that what is inside the belly of any writer is
merely a dictionary of received ideas: if the writer “seeks to express
himself, at least he knows that the interior ‘thing’ he claims to ‘trans¬
late’ is itself no more than a ready-made lexicon, whose words can
be explained only through other words, and this ad infinitum'
(“DA,” 53). This link between translation and copying is not coinci¬
dental, for the essay goes on to outline the story of “an adventure
which exemplarily befell young Thomas de Quincey, so versed in his
Greek that in order to translate certain absolutely modern ideas and
images into this dead language, Baudelaire tells us, ‘he had a dic¬
tionary made for himself, one much more complex and extensive
than the kind produced by the vulgar patience of purely literary
themes’ {Lesparadis artificiels)” (“DA,” 53). The interpretation is re¬
vealing, for in Baudelaire’s exuberant version of the events in Stacy
Diamond’s English translation, the anecdote is told to show the
youthful De Quincey’s precociousness:
at fifteen, he not only composed Greek verses in lyric meters but could
converse in Greek fluently and without embarrassment, an ability which
he owed to the habit of daily improvising into Greek a translation of the
English newspapers. Ransacking his memory and imagination for a
crowd of periphrastic phrases, to express absolutely modern ideas and
images in a dead language, was an exercise that gave him a compass of
diction of far greater depth and breadth than that which would have
been developed by dull translation of purely literary essays.15
What is inside De Quincey—according to Baudelaire—is not so

much a ready-made lexicon as “memory and imagination”; of
course, very much in keeping with his metaphors, Barthes would
have us stifle Baudelaire’s enthusiasm over young De Quincey’s at¬
tempts at reviving a dead language. What is worth noting is that De
Quincey’s translation exercise is precisely the kind of gesture—
following the argument Alina Clej lays out in A Genealogy of the Mod¬
ern Self—which would signal a modern life of letters.16 Significantly,
Baudelaire’s work itself started as a translation of Confessions of an
Opium Eater. When publishers refused to publish such a long tract,

Baudelaire pared down the text by summarizing certain passages
and quoting others; this translating strategy has the effect on readers
of establishing Baudelaire’s authorial identity (that is, his voice) sep¬
arate from De Quincey’s (as he recreates it in French) even in his
professed efforts to “fuse my personal feelings with those of the au¬
thor to create an amalgam, the two halves of which must combine
to form an indistinguishable whole.’’17 The resulting French text has
a plurality of narrative voices, a multiplicity of authors. De Quincey’s
English version of the Confessions as well, Clej asserts, should be un¬
derstood “not as a singular text but a body of texts,’’ its subjectivity
seen as “decentered, ‘nomadic,’ ” and therefore modern, its con¬
struction “simulacral” (after Baudrillard’s use of the term).18 She
reads his dependency on both intoxicants and “scriptorial” writing
(a phrase adapted from Barthes’s essay) as a prototypically nine¬
teenth-century reaction to “the crisis of the referent, the crisis of the
concept of uniqueness in a system geared to the massive reproduc¬
tion of signs and images, and the writer’s disaffection from the pres¬
ent in which he or she is nonetheless engaged.”19 Let us forget for
the moment that in De Quincey’s English version the Greek diction¬
ary episode is recounted for yet another purpose, seemingly. We no¬
tice not the abjectly devout confessional tone of an Augustine, but
something more contemporary in its pathos, whereby the braggartly
tone is offset by the wry immediacy of his complaints: his father dies
when he is seven, and his one claim of notoriety (his fluency with
Greek) is beaten down by “coarse, clumsy, and inelegant” tutors.20
What is more important to note is that in its methods De Quincey’s
version is as much a “creative translation”—as Clej puts it—as
Baudelaire’s. Like a ragpicker, she writes, a translator, or ingenuous
compiler, De Quincey “collects the odds and ends that come his way
and turns them to good account.”21 And yet, Clej notices, such a
process produces in him an unmistakable anxiety, for he is not able
to reconcile his methods with the demands for “absolute original¬
ity” so prevalent at the time.22 What is a god among many to do
when expected to act the improbable part of the one and only
God?23
Baudelaire’s response is to revel in the artifice. In a poem that is

part of the plural text called—we must note again—Les paradis artifi-
ciels, Baudelaire combines translations of De Quincey’s confessions
with his own confessions in such a way that his identity within the
text as intoxicated writer becomes interchangeable with De
Quincey’s as intoxicated writer with the “sensitive modern man” as

scientific (and therefore repeatable) variable:
Shall I report how, while in the thrall of the poison, our man soon places
himself at the center of the universe? How he becomes the extreme in¬
carnation of the proverb which says that “passion reigns sovereign over
all”? He believes in his own virtue and genius—can we not anticipate the
outcome? All outward objects are so many suggestions which stimulate
worlds of thought, all of them more intensely colored, more glorious,
and more subtle, and all clothed in a magical gloss . . . these museums
crowded with beautiful forms and startling colors—these libraries that
hold the works of Science and the dreams of the Muse—these musical
instruments that sing in unison—these female enchantresses, rendered
still more charming by the science of their adornment and the economy
of gaze—all of these marvels have been made for me, for me, for me! Hu¬
manity has labored, has been martyred and immolated, for me!—to
serve as fodder, as pabulum, for my insatiable appetite for emotion,
knowledge, and beauty!” I will skip ahead and summarize. No one will
be astonished that a final, crowning thought springs from the dreamer’s
brain: I have become God! That savage, ardent cry explodes from his chest
with such energy and force that if an intoxicated man could make his
wish his power, and his thought a deed, that cry would topple the angels
lining the path of heaven: “I am God!” (PA, 70)
We can read in the pathos a great good humor, or a sincerity that

borders on the reverential, even maniacal; we can imagine “our
man” as Baudelaire, as De Quincey, as the “sensitive modern man”
Baudelaire claims to write to: “what the Romantic school now terms
the ‘misunderstood artist,’ ” as he explains, “and what families and
the bourgeois masses damn with the epithet ‘original’ ” (PA, 62). In
Barthes’s essay, however, we notice a restrained distance between
Balzac (who, incidentally, appears in Baudelaire’s Paradis as an ab¬
stemious milksop)-4 and the author we imagine speaking. The
“Barthes” that Howard translates, asks us to believe that no writer
would ever feel intoxicated enough with his prose to make such a
claim: “the scriptor no longer contains passions, moods, sentiments,
impressions, but that immense dictionary from which he draws a
writing which will be incessant: life merely imitates the book, and
this book itself is but a tissue of signs, endless imitation, infinitely
postponed” (“DA,” 53). And yet the very style of the prose belies
such a statement. If we were to be asked who is speaking, would we
not answer: the Author-God? What would stop us from reading the
essay as ironic (I am God) confession? Simpler indeed to conclude
that we hear only Barthes speaking (sincerely) when we read the

essay, and that Barthes like Howard and Heath is empty of all pas¬
sions, moods, sentiments, impressions.
In the eighteenth century Johann Breitinger observed that the

only difference between an author and a translator was that the au¬
thor’s text couldn’t be held up for comparison to that which he was
trying to render.25 These two or many centuries later, despite a post¬
modern awareness of representation as simulacra, a strict concep¬
tual division continues to be maintained between the copyist as au¬
thor and the copyist as translator. French notions of authorship,
Molly Nesbitt observes, can be evidenced in copyright laws (“droits
d’auteur”) which were first instituted at the time of the Revolution
and amended only in 1957 when the difference between artistic ex¬
pression and industrial production was seen to be a problem.26 The
crucial distinction was that artistic work evidenced “personality”
whereas industrial products did not, and it was this distinction, Nes¬
bitt claims, which aroused theorists like Roland Barthes and Michel
Foucault to write essays investigating claims of authorship. The 1957
law ignores the notoriously messy contradiction presented by the
case of translation:
The disposition of the present law protects the rights of authors and cov¬
ers all work of the mind, whatever the kind, the form of expression, the
merit or the destination. The following are considered work of the mind:
books, brochures, and other literary, artistic, and scientific writing; lec¬
tures, speeches, oaths, pleas and other work of this nature; drama and
musical theatre; choreography and pantomime when the work is re¬
corded in writing or otherwise; musical compositions with or without
words; cinema and work obtained by an analogous process; drawing,
painting, architecture, sculpture, engraving, lithography; artistic and
documentary photography and work obtained by analogous process; the
applied arts; illustrations, maps; plans, sketches and models related to
geography, topography, architecture or the sciences. The authors of
translations, adaptations, transformations or arrangements of works of
the mind enjoy protection under this law, without prejudice to the rights
of the author of the original work. The same follows for those authors
of anthologies or collections of diverse work who by the choice and ar¬
rangement of the material do the work of intellectual creation . . . The
author enjoys this right with respect to his name, his quality, and his
work. This right is attached to his person.27
The law describes the authors of a translated work in the plural dis¬
tinct from the author of the work in the singular, but does not spec¬
ify how to distinguish whose mind is to be held responsible for the
intellectual creation of the text (in the singular, even though it is
plural), whose singular person these rights should be attached to.

The logic of such a law would have us sense Howard’s personality or
Heath’s in the English version of “The Death of the Author” to the
exclusion of Barthes’s. Our problem, we thus see, lies not in ac¬
knowledging the existence of an author, but in demanding his au¬
thority to be absolute, the inspiration entirely singular and original.
In Barthes’s essay we are asked to consider the removal of the Au¬

thor (“distanced” in the Brechtian sense, diminishing like a figure
at the far end of the stage) in an authorial voice that is anything but
diminished.28 Barthes writes: “avec Brecht, on pourrait parler ici
d’un veritable ‘distancement,’ l’Auteur diminuant comme une fig¬
urine tout au bout de la scene litteraire” (“MA,” 493). Howard
chooses to render this authoritative weightiness by adopting the plu¬
ral: “with Brecht, we might speak here of a veritable distancing”
(“DA,” 51). As readers of the English version we are forced to con¬
sider who we might imagine included in this “we” speaking with
Brecht. An intimate confidence exchanged between reader and au¬
thor (as Barthes? as Howard)? Or a more public, more formal scene
with many readers, and perhaps at least two authors? Heath, for his
part, retains the singular first-person pronoun in English, which
gives his version a more ambiguous, less personal quality: “one
could talk here with Brecht of a veritable ‘distancing,’ ”29 but he tem¬
pers that bit of formality with a more colloquial cadence (shifting
“with Brecht” to the middle of the phrase where it seems less liter¬
ary) and level of diction (“talk” instead of “speak”). In his version
the question becomes, Who do you imagine being the “one” who
could talk with Brecht? Barthes? Heath? You the reader? If there can
only be one “one” at any moment, how would you fill this empty
sign?
If Barthes were removed, would there be anything in the text to

engage us? We understand through the force of the writing that the
text is not an impersonal working out of ideas, but has an unmistak¬
able style, voice, personality. Howard or Heath could have recreated
this essay using the same strategy Baudelaire used with De Quincey’s
Confessions and made their voices, their personalities, just as present
in the work as Barthes’s, in a similarly approving, even laudatory
way, but they didn’t. They could have translated his work ironically,
keeping themselves perched just outside the perimeter of the text,
laughing inwardly at Barthes’s earnestness, as Flaubert laughed at
hapless Bouvard and Pecuchet, but they didn’t. If we were as adept
at reading translated work by writers such as Howard or Heath as we
were the texts of De Quincey or Baudelaire or Flaubert, we could
analyze their creative decisions more astutely. We would see that

they each chose to don a Barthes mask and to play his part on the
literary stage, quoting Barthes so thoroughly the illusion is main¬
tained that there is no stage, no false copy. There comes no need
for quotation marks then, no hint at the territory in the text’s perim¬
eter. No space for parody, nor distance for circumspection. So that
as readers we can forget there is a plurality of voices, an illusion of
literature, and can imagine only Barthes speaking to us in a self-as¬
sured first-person plural pronoun—“We know now”—as surely as if
the Author-God alone were speaking.30
Notes
1. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, "Thus Spake Zarathustra,” Third Part, in The Portable
Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Viking, 1982), 294. On this passage Gilles Deleuze
writes: “And the death of this God, who claimed to be the only one, is itself plural; the death
of God is an event with a multiple sense.” Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
(London: Athlone, 1983), 4.
2. Jacques Derrida, "Des tours de Babel,” trans. and ed. Joseph F. Graham, Difference in
Translation (Ithaca,'N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 171.
3. Roland Barthes, “La morte de hauteur,” Oeuvres completes, vol. 2 (Paris: Seuil, 1994),
491-95. Hereafter “MA,” cited in the text. LInless noted, all English translations are by Rich¬
ard Howard, “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of
California Press,1986), 49-55. Hereafter “DA,” cited in the text. Also referred to is Stephen
Heath’s translation in Image Music Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 142-48.
4. It should be noted here that the first published version of Barthes’s “La morte,” ap¬
peared in translation in 1967, written for a multimedia edition of the journal aspen, No. 5-6,
ed. Brian O’Doherty, where recordings of Merce Cunningham and Marcel Duchamp, a small
cut-out sculpture by Tony Smith, and “data” by John Cage and Alain Robbe-Grillet spill out
of the plain white cardboard container like toys from a cereal box. Molly Nesbitt in “What
Was an Author?” Yale French Studies, No. 73 (1987) notes that “the magazine moved toward a
denial of old-style authorship . . . [and] chipped away at the traditional separation that had
been legislated between the high culture and industry” (241). Howard’s translation of “The
Death of the Author” was published in a small booklet that was one of the prizes, as it were.
5. Heath, Image, 142.
6. George Steiner, in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2d ed. (New York:
Oxford Univeristy Press, 1992), speaks of the Babel myth as man’s attempt to solve metaphori¬
cally the riddle of that “primal scattering of languages . . . that so absurdly divide him” by
understanding it as divine punishment (59).
7. Derrida, “Tours de Babel,” 171.
8. Douglas Robinson, in Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities beyond Reason (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2001), notes: “The only way that the Hebrew Bible can lay claim to being God’s
Word ... is if its writers wrote not as their human selves but as the channels of God’s spirit;
and the only way that the Septuagint can lay claim to being God’s Word is if its translators
channeled the same spirit also. For Augustine, proof that the 72 did in fact channel that spirit
lies in the legend that all 72 translators were kept in sequestered cells and still managed to
produce 72 verbatim identical translations. Humans could never achieve this sort of result on
their own” (52).
9. Gustave Flaubert, de Bouvard et Pecuchet, vol. 2, ed. Genevieve Bolleme (Paris: Denoel,
1966), 238. English title, “Dictionary of Received Ideas,” trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York:
Penguin Books, 1976), 294. Hereafter these two editions will be cited in the text by page refer¬
ences only.
10. For a further explanation of the way hierarchies and humor work in translation, see my
“Writing from Below: Ironic Distance and the Location of Translation,” Genre 22 (2001): 32-
54. Special issue on “The Dislocation of Culture.”
11. Krailsheimer has omitted a line that appears in the French: “Rire de lui prouve une
superiorite d’esprit” [Laugh at it to show your superiority]. I have also changed the transla¬
tion from “make fun of” to “laugh” for “rire” since it better suits my purposes.
12. H. L. Hix makes this point in some detail in Morte d’Author: An Autopsy (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1990) with a distinction between the “creadve author” and the “cre¬
ated author” (39 ff.).
13. Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1992), 26.
14. Quoted in ibid., 29.
15. Charles Baudelaire, Les paradis artificiels (Geneva: Cailler, 1946), 80-81. Hereafter PA,
cited in the text. Translated as Artificial Paradises by Stacy Diamond (New York: Citadel Press,
1996), 81. Hereafter AP, cited in the text.
16. Alina Clej, A Genealogy of the Modem Self: Thomas De Quincey and the Intoxication of Writing
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). She writes: “De Quincey’s literary output,
which is both a symptom and an effect of his addictions to opium and to writing, plays an
important and mosdy unacknowledged role in the development of modern and modernist
forms of subjectivity” (v).
17. Letter to Poulet-Malassis, 16 February 1860, as quoted by Diamond, trans., Artificial Par¬
adises, xx.
18. Clej, A Genealogy, 17.
19. Ibid.
20. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater, ed. Philip Smith (New York: Dover,
1995), 6.
21. Clej, A Genealogy, 216.
22. Ibid., 217.
23. Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Rep¬
resentation, ed. Brian Willis (Boston, Mass.: Godine, 1984), writes: “What if God himself can
be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole
system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal,
but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an
uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference” (256).
24. “Balzac evidently thought that the man who was made to surrender his self-command
could know no greater shame or suffering. One night I saw him at a party at which the prodi¬
gious effects of hashish were being discussed. He listened and asked questions with amusing
attentiveness and enthusiasm. The people who knew him concluded that he must be genu¬
inely interested. But the idea that a man could lose control of his intellectual processes appar¬
ently came as a great shock to him. Someone offered him the dawamesk; he examined it,
sniffed it, and handed it back without having tried it” (Paradis, 72n.).
25. Johann Breitinger, “On the Origins of Language,” Translating Literature: The German
Tradition, ed. and trans. Andre Lefevere (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1977), 26.
26. Nesbitt, “What Was an Author?” 229-57.
27. In ibid., 238: loi 11 mars 1957, Recueil Sirey, 1957, 124.
28. This is my own version of Barthes, “La morte,” 493.
29. Heath, Image, 145.
30. Barthes’s “Nous savons maintenant,” “La morte,” 493; Howard, “Death,” 52; Heath,
Image, 146.
Contemporary French Poetry
and Translation
Maryann De Julio
Kent State University
F OR the last twenty or thirty years, contemporary French poetry

has been turning to the translation of other poetry from differ¬
ent languages into French. The reasons for this are as numerous as
the interconnections between translation and the circumstances of
current writing in France.1
In 1983, for example, Fondation Royaumont, just outside of Paris,
created a literary center (Centre Litteraire), which immediately be¬
came the site for a series of translation workshops and seminars in
response to what the poet Bernard Noel, its then director, perceived
as a lack of contemporary poetry in translation.2 In 1990, the center
was renamed Centre de Poesie Cf Traduction, which has since organized
over fifty-two seminars, welcomed more than ninety poets of over
thirty-five different nationalities and twenty-two different languages,
and published more than thirty-seven books in the collection Les Ca-
hiers de Royaumont. A network of centers for the translation of con¬
temporary poetry, recently underwritten by the European Commis¬
sion in Brussels, now exists in Europe with centers in Portugal,
Ireland, Italy, Turkey, Catalonia, Spain, Sweden, Poland, and, of
course, France (and soon, Germany). Similar experiments in collec¬
tive translation have been conducted in Bordeaux, Marseille, and on
the initiative of Emmanuel Hocquard’s Un Bureau sur TAtlantique, in
New Orleans (Louisiana), and, more recently, in Japan.3
Those associated with the Centre de Poesie Cf Traduction at the Fon¬
dation Royaumont, including Re my Hourcade (translator and current
director), believe that a translation into French is a contribution to
French literature, which enriches the French literary patrimony: “la
traduction fonde sa propre origine au moment ou le franyais s’ar-
rache a la langue etrangere” [the translation originates the moment
that the French breaks free of the foreign language] .4 From the be¬
ginning, the guiding principle for the translation seminars and
151
workshops was simple: to invite one, or possibly two, foreign poets

whose work is often not well known in France to spend ten days in
France, five of them at Royaumont where they meet and work with
French writers and translators on a daily basis, with the specific goal
of producing a collective translation. The invited poets are to be
translated only by other poets, line by line, out loud and, then, in
writing. Generally, most of the French poets present do not know
the language of the guest poets, which necessitates the presence of
a bilingual translator who provides a literal version, a word-for-word
translation, the basis for a provisionally more definitive translation
to be reread and finalized by one of the French poets before publi¬
cation. There are two bilingual public readings at the close of the
seminar—one at Royaumont and the other in Paris. Several months
later, the collectively translated texts are published by Editions
Creaphis in two different collections: Un Bureau sur TAtlantique, which
publishes North American poets, and Les Cahiers de Royaumont,
which publishes poets from all other countries.5
It is in keeping with the current circumstances of poetry in France
that there be certain “cultural conditions” associated with the Centre
de Poesie Cf Traduction at Royaumont as well as with the network of
translation centers throughout Europe, which it gave rise to. Each
center must be housed in an historical monument or otherwise ex¬
ceptional site with residential facilities for the collaborative work to
be undertaken. There should also be a permanent infrastructure,
capable of preparing and implementing all stages of the program in
question. Furthermore, the centers should contract with a publish¬
ing house for the eventual publication of the collective translations
effected during the seminars.
Auxiliary cultural activities have been inaugurated at Fondation
Royaumont, which result directly from the collective translation semi¬
nars and workshops: is it still possible to speak of translation when
the activity per se no longer concerns the passage of a text from one
language into another? By insisting on the notion of translation in
its largest possible sense, the Centre de Poesie & Traduction now seeks
a wider audience with projects that might include musicians, pho¬
tographers, or video artists, for example, along with poets, in experi¬
mental writing workshops or doing neighborhood theater in “un¬
derprivileged” districts. There are regular interdisciplinary weekend
retreats, printmaking workshops where poets and painters can col¬
laborate on livres d’artiste, and a research program, as well, with a
forum on the Internet.
What has come to be called Les Diagonales a Royaumont, which
dates from 1994 and 1995, consists of Ateliers Cosmopolites where two
DE JULIO: CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY AND TRANSLATION 153
diverse groups of artists, from different countries and different disci¬

plines, collaborate in response to the idea that translation need not
necessarily be limited to the field of literature. The artists work out
their responses together, over a period of five weeks, and, then,
there is a public exhibit of what they have produced collectively.
More recently, the Centre de Poesie Cf Traduction has expanded its
research in two different directions. In an attempt to invent a new
form of expression in certain quarters whose communities feel, and
often rightfully so, that their voice has been “confiscated,” artists
and residents, both young and old, have turned to translation to re¬
store their sense of autonomy. The group experiment or adventure
is to interpret or “translate” a one-line poem or monostich. Remi¬
niscent of the original encounters at Royaumont, which emphasized
writing and language, a kind of game has also been invented—lejeu
des taches blanches [the game of white spots]—where a dozen writers
of various nationalities are invited to participate over a period of sev¬
eral years in mapping out the heretofore unexplored space between
languages: “Faire des cartes, pas des caiques,”6 Translation, in this
sense, is not about suppressing distance or difference; it’s about cel¬
ebrating it.
Though there may have been a kind of populist poetry in France
during the 1930s and 1940s, which served a political or social func¬
tion expressing collective hopes and suffering, a poetry of resis¬
tance, or even an “occasional poetry,”7 French poetry would, subse¬
quently, be problematized, its very existence and practice placed in
question. Sartre’s 1952 preface to Mallarme’s Poesie (1945) would re¬
mind us that the monumental circumstances that poetry might take
as its occasions—deaths, historic events and affairs of state—could
be collapsed into the occasion itself of writing: “Rien n’aura lieu que
le lieu” [Nothing will have taken place but the place].8
The advent in France in the 1970s of the American style “public
reading,” the proliferation of new technologies such as tape record¬
ers, video recorders, and videodiscs may have attempted to ally sci¬
ence and poetry in order to renew communication with society;9
however, by the end of the 1990s poets were saying that they no
longer knew for whom they wrote.10 Jacques Dupin had always con¬
tended that the poet addresses “l’inconnu de tout lecteur,” that
part of the reader that is unknown or foreign. And if poetry were
upsetting, intransigent, that is, always slightly foreign, as Jean-Marie
Gleize claimed, “qa n’est pas pour rien que les plus grands poetes
d’aujourd’hui se livrent eperdument au travail de traduction” [it’s
not for nothing that the greatest living poets today are passionately
engaged in the work of translation].11
Yves Bonnefoy has translated Shakespeare; Philippe Jaccottet,

Holderlin, Rilke, and Ungaretti; Andre du Bouchet has translated
Celan; and Denis Roche, Ezra Pound. Jacqueline Risset has trans¬
lated Dante; Henri Meschonnic, the Hebrew Bible; Claire Malroux,
Emily Dickinson and Derek Walcott. The list is long. Where Emman¬
uel Hocquard and Claude Royet-Journoud have put out an anthol¬
ogy of contemporary American poets in translation, Michael Bishop
has provided us with women’s poetry in translation.12 Which poets
get translated is significant—the poetry that Bishop’s anthology
makes available to a larger Francophone, and now, an Anglophone
audience as well, is, as he states in his introduction, “still today
barely available except in specialized libraries, and then only in scat¬
tered fashion.” The American poet Marilyn Hacker, whose transla¬
tions of six poems by Claire Malroux, which appeared in Prairie
Schooner in May 1998, and won a poetry prize, not a prize for transla¬
tion, pointed out in her 1996 introduction to Edge (Malroux in trans¬
lation for Wake Forest University Press) that, “the poetry of Muriel
Rukeyser, of Audre Lorde, of Adrienne Rich—even of Sylvia Plath
and Anne Sexton—has not yet interested any French publisher.”13
But poetry translation, a truly collaborative activity, and even, per¬
haps, a reaction to globalization or the homogenizing of cultural dif¬
ferences, is becoming, more and more, of interest in France. The
Etats Generaux de la Poesie, which took place in Marseille in 1992, had
a round table discussion on poetry and translation.14 Speaking of his
translation of the Iliad into French, Bruno Cany called translation
“le travail d’accueil” [the work of reception].15 For Marc de Launay,
associated with the collection Poesie/Gallimard, translating poetry
is not just translating a poem, but rather translating from one lan¬
guage into another, from one culture into another, and, hence,
from a whole collection of traditions into another tradition.16 Trans¬
lation is simply, for de Faunay, “le lieu ou s’exprime notre rapport
au sens fondateur de notre culture” [the place where our most basic
rapport with our culture gets expressed].17
Michel Deguy promotes literary translation in Po&Sie, the 128-
page journal devoted to contemporary poetry, which he founded in
1977.16 For Deguy, “le mondialisation culturelle de la poesie” [the
cultural globalization of poetry] makes magazines and journals espe¬
cially propitious sites for translation: “Virtuellement, tousles corpus
poetiques de toutes les langues-et-litteratures sont prets a s’aug-
menter de leur traduction reciproque” [Virtually, all the poetic cor-
puses of all the languages-and-literatures are ready to be augmented
by their reciprocal translation].19 In a global economy where inter¬
national transactions proliferate and cultural bureaucrats have used
festivals and partnerships with industry and the media to proclaim

poetry part of the market, then, everything becomes translation for
the poet. All poets now have a stake, or “market share,” in the new
economy when poetry is viewed as an expression of national heri¬
tage.
If translation has become the circumstance under which poetry is
written, and poetry [is] “l’hote du (poeme de) la circonstance”
[hosts the poem’s occasion or circumstance], as Deguy puts it,
might we not reiterate the poet’s question: “Quelle est la circon¬
stance? Telle est peut-etre l’essence de l’hote: on ne sait pas qui
c’est” [What’s the occasion? (Under what circumstance?) Such is
perhaps the essence of the host: you don’t know who it is].20 In Julia
Kristeva’s words, we are, to invoke the title of her book, “Strangers
to Ourselves.” That is, “the involution of the strange in the psyche,”
which “integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an oth¬
erness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral
part of the same," makes us our own foreigners; we are divided. The
uncanny, “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is
known of old and long familiar,” is within us.21
Kristeva tells us that “in France, at the end of the twentieth cen¬
tury, [newcomers] are fated to remain the same and the other—
without forgetting [their] original culture but putting it in perspec¬
tive to the extent of having it not only exist side by side but also
alternate with others’ culture . . . We are called upon through the
pressures of the economy, the media, and history to live together in
a single country , France, itself in the process of being integrated into
Europe.”22 Translation can provide us with figures of alterity and a
mode of signification that surprises and returns us to the source of
poetry: “moments where the circumstance and the formula, the
phase and the phrase, are mutually clarified,” as Deguy has ob¬
served with regard to “la/orccde la poesie” [poetry’s force].23
Traduttore, traditore—to translate is to violate language, but to vio¬
late language in the same way that, say, for example, Jaccottet’s
poems, under the influence of haiku, aim at literality: to make lan¬
guage transparent, imageless, to create relationships between words
without explanation.24 We are reminded of Walter Benjamin’s no¬
tion of the task of the translator: to incorporate in detail “the origi¬
nal’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the
translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language.” A real
translation is transparent for Benjamin: “it does not cover the origi¬
nal, does not block its light. . . This may be achieved, above all, by a
literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sen¬
tences to be the primary element of the translator.”25
In Fragmes, a cycle of texts in Echancre by Jacques Dupin, the term

fragmes echoes Benjamin’s remarks about the text as fragment of a
greater language. “Un vieil Algerien perdu, analphabete” (An old
Algerian, lost, illiterate), one of the pieces in Fragmes, reinscribes the
“uncanny strangeness” of all writing in the figure of the “other,
the immigrant in France: “ce qu’il demande: lire, avoir lu, avoir
ecrit . lire pour lui, liberer les mots, le liberer de l’inconnu des
mots,—et traduire en geste, peut-etre pour sa survie, la barriere,
l’hermetisme de toute ecriture . . [what he asks: to read, to have
read, to have written . to read for him, to liberate the words, to liber¬
ate him from the foreign in words,—to translate into gesture, per¬
haps for his survival, the barrier, the hermeticism of all writing . . .] .2b
In Dupin’s text, we find ourselves confronted with the two poles be¬
tween which translation oscillates: Vintraduisible comme valeur [ the un¬
translatable as valuable] and la traduisibilite universelle [universal trans-
latability\, to quote Antoine Berman in L’epreuve de Vetranger.21
If in the last twenty to thirty years, French poets have been turning
to the translation of other poetry from different languages into
French, Claude Esteban, the poet-in-residence at Fondation Royau-
mont, tells us that this fact points to an inner necessity—“un souci
de ressourcement ou tout au moins de dialogue avec une parole tout
a la fois etrangere et proche” [a concern for dialogue with a word
that is both foreign and close].28 The poet-translator responds to a
certain lack; however, the impossibility of the perfect translation or
absolute plenitude dooms his actions to failure, which, in turn, calls
forth their infinite repetition.
Translating Paul Celan gives Martine Broda the impression of
writing poems that she would have liked to write without having
been capable of doing so.29 Translating Jorge Guillen permitted
Claude Esteban to seize what it was in French that he was trying to
say. He felt encouraged to break with certain implicit taboos regard¬
ing poetic rhythm in the French poem: “S’il n’y a plus vraiment
d’lorthodoxie’ en matiere de poesie frangaise . . . nous le devons
indiscutablement a ces voix qui nous viennent d’ailleurs, et qui nous
parlent, desormais dans notre langue” [If there’s really no longer
any “orthodoxy” in matters of French poetry ... we owe it, indisput¬
ably, to those voices that come to us from elsewhere, and who speak
to us, henceforth, in our language] .30 For Joseph Guglielmi, transla¬
tion is a question of themes and relations with what is called the real,
but especially with the syntax of these relations: “ [Travailler] le sens
en incorporant au texte des expressions ‘etrangeres’ empruntees
qui nourissent l’ecriture et ouvrent son champ (son chant)” [[To
work] on meaning by incorporating into the text borrowed “for-
eign” expressions, which nourish the writing and increase its

range].31
More than ten years ago, the revue Le Debat asked ten French
poets who had all been published at one time or another by Galli-
mard, the prestigious Parisian publishing house, if they thought that
poetry was in danger of disappearing from contemporary French so¬
ciety.32 And so, Yves Bonnefoy, Andre du Bouchet, Jean-Pierre Co-
lombi, Philippe Delaveau, Jacques Dupin, Jean Grosjean, Marcelin
Pleynet, Jacques Reda, Jacques Roubaud, and Claude Roy all re¬
flected on the current circumstances of poetry. In 1991, Marc Fu-
maroli (Professor of European Literature and the Arts at the Col¬
lege de France) published the book L’etat culture in which he stated
that the collective French memory was at risk in our era of cultural
bureaucracy. What France needed, according to Fumaroli, was to re¬
turn to the notion of culture that had prevailed during the period
of French Enlightenment when living in a civilized society was a
practiced art—un art d’etre bien ensemble.™
Contemporary French poetry can be seen to have turned to trans¬
lation in an attempt to resist the globalization of language: “II s’agit
de defendre la langue et les rapports inter-langues contre l’homoge-
neisation croissante des systemes de communication. Car c’est tout
le regne des appartenances et des differences que ceux-ci mettent
en peril. Aneantissement des dialectes, de parlers locaux; banalisa-
tion des langues nationales; aplanissement des differences entre cel-
les-ci au profit d’un modele de non-langue” [It’s a question of de¬
fending language and interlanguage relations against the growing
homogenization of systems of communication, since theyjeopardize
the entire rule of membership and difference: annihilation of dia¬
lects and localisms; banalization of national languages; flattening
out differences between languages to further the model of a nonlan¬
guage], affirms Berman in defense of translation.34 But enterprises
like those at the Fondation Royaumont indicate that notions of what
exactly translation of poetry is have been expanded. A growing num¬
ber of poets in France at the beginning of the twenty-first century
now agree that poetry can be experienced as the site of a multiplicity
of competing voices whose various tensions and translations allow us
to be reflective beings, that is, open to the “other” that is in us and
beyond.
Notes
1. For a brief overview of the phenomenon of translation and creation in poetry, seen in
tandem, read Pierre Menard’s essay, “Trente ans de traduction poetique en France: Un bref
tour d’horizon,” La Pensee, No. 297 (January-February-March 1994), 59-65.
2. The Fondation Royaumont was created in 1964 by Henry and Isabel Gouin, and was the
first private French foundation with a cultural mission. The Fondation Royaumont is housed in
the Abbaye de Royaumont, a former Cistercian monastery founded in 1228 by Louis IX, the
future Saint Louis. In addition to translation workshops and seminars for contemporary
poetry, the foundation sponsors programs in medieval and contemporary vocal and instru¬
mental music, as well as dance choreography. Information for this essay comes from the web¬
site: http:www.royaumont.com.
3. Un Bureau sur I’Atlantique is a nonprofit association, which was founded in 1989 by Em¬
manuel Hocquard, with support from the Centre National du Livre and the Centre de Poesie &
Traduction at Fondation Royaumont. Its mission is to promote awareness of contemporary Ameri¬
can poetry in French.
4. Remy Hourcade, “La traduction de poesie a Royaumont,” La Pensee, No. 297, 77-78.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
5. North American poets who have been published in the Un Bureau sur I’Atlantique series
at Editions Creaphis (since 1993) include Tom Raworth, Cole Swensen, Joseph Simas, Rachel
Blau DuPlessis, Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, Benjamin Hollander, Laura Moriarty, Norma
Cole, Michael Palmer, Jackson Mac Low, Stacy Doris, Chet Wiener, Jennifer Moxley, and Bob
Perelman. Recent publications in the Les Cahiers de Royaumont series include Hans Arnfrid
Astel (from German); Salih Ecer (from Turkish); Antijie Krog and Tatamkhulu Africa (from
Afrikaans and English); and Richard Pietrass (from German).
6. Le jeu des laches blanches refers to a series of remarks by Emmanuel Hocquard, which
were commissioned and published by LE “GAM” in 1997, about the translation of contempo¬
rary' American poetry into French. Hocquard likened the uncharted areas on world atlases,
which were known to previous generations of which his was probably the last, to taches blanches
[white spots]. His idea was that French translations of contemporary American poetry could
reintroduce similarly unexplored distances into today’s French literature. His statement,
“Faire des cartes, pas des caiques,” expresses the spirit of such an enterprise: “Make maps, not
tracings,” that is, “Be a cartographer, not a copier.” For further information, see Emmanuel Hoc-
quard’s essay, “Faire quelque chose avec ga,” in the anthology of contemporary poetry, A
Royaumont: Traduction collective 1983-2000 (Editions Creaphis, 2000), 398-407.
7. Jean-Marie Gleize, “Un metier d’ignorance: Etats de la poesie en France aujourd’hui,”
in Poesies aujourd’hui, ed. Bruno Gregoire (Paris: Seghers, 1990), 237.
8. Stephane Mallarme quoted byJean-Paul Sartre in Sartre’s preface to Poesies (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1952), 11.
9. See Gleize, “Un metier d’ignorance,” esp. pages 237, 254, and 257.
10. See Yves Charnet, “Malaise dans la poesie: Un etat des lieux,” Litterature, No. 110 (June
1998), 13-21.
11. Gleize, “Un metier d’ignorance,” 276.
12. See Emmanuel Hocquard and Claude Royet-Journoud, eds., 49+ 1 nouveaux poetes
americains (Editions Royaumont, 1991) and Michael Bishop, ed., Women’s Poetry in France
(1965-1995) (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1997).
13. Claire Malroux, Edge, trans. Marilyn Hacker (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest Univer¬
sity Press, 1996), ix. The Journals: 1950—1962 of Sylvia Plath, with an introduction by Ted
Hughes, were published by Gallimard in 1999 (trans. Christine Savinel); Plath’s Winter Trees
(trans. Frangoise Morvan) and Crossing the Water (trans. Valerie Rouzeau) were published to¬
gether in a bilingual edition by Gallimard in 1999; and her Bed Book (trans. Beatrice Vierne)
was published by Anatolia/Le Rocher (Paris) in 1997. In 1998, Audre Lorde’s book, Zami, A
New Spelling of My Name, was published in Laval, Quebec by Trois (trans. Frederique Press-
mann).
14. Etats generaux de la poesie: Marseille 12-13-14 juin 1992 (Marseille: Centre International
de la Poesie Marseille, Musees de Marseille, 1993).
15. Ibid., 98.

16. Ibid., 103.
17. Ibid., 105.
18. Just a few of the poets who have appeared in French translation, in a bilingual format,
in Po&Sie include Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Seferis, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Celan,
Tom Raworth, Nelly Sachs, John Ashbery, Constantin Cavafy, Emily Dickinson, Leonardo Sin-
isgalli, Walt Whitman, Eugenio Montale, and Marina Tsvetaieva.
19. Michel Deguy, “Situation,” Litterature, No. 110, 6.
20. Ibid., 8. N.B.: The French word hole means both “host” and “guest.”
21. See Julia Kxisteva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991), 181, 183.
22. Ibid., 194.
23. Deguy, “Situation,” 9-10.
24. Gleize, “Un metier d’ignorance,” 270.
25. Walter Benjamin. “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Theories of Trans¬
lation: An Anthology of Essays from Thyden to Denida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chi¬
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 79-80.
26. Jacques Dupin, Echancre (Paris: P.O.L., 1991), 43.
27. Antoine Berman, L’epreuve de Petranger {Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 289.
28. From a discussion about translation and French poetry, which took place among six
poet-translators (Claude Esteban, Martine Broda, Lorand Caspar, Joseph Guglielmi, Emman¬
uel Moses, and Jean-Baptiste Para); see Gregoire, ed., Poesie aujourd’hui, 131.
29. Ibid., 133.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 134. N.B: The French word champ means “field,” and chant means “song.”
32. LeDebat, No. 54 (March-April 1989).
33. Marc Fumaroli, L’etat culture (Paris: Fallois, 1991), 171.
34. Berman, L’epreuve, 288.
“Happy Babel?” Translation in Europe
Ina Pfitzner
Europe est fondee sur les traductions.

—Henri Meschonnic
R OMANIAN-American writer Andrei Codrescu tells the follow¬

ing story:
One August evening in 1956, when I was ten years old, I heard a thou¬
sand-year-old shepherd wrapped in a cloak of smoke tell a story around
a Carpathian campfire. He said that a long time ago, when time was an
idea whose time hadn’t come, when the pear trees made peaches, and
when fleas jumped into the sky wearing iron shoes weighing ninety-nine
pounds each, there lived in these parts a sheep called Mioritza.
The flock to which Mioritza belongs is owned by three brothers. One
night, Mioritza overhears the older brothers plotting to kill the youngest
in the morning, in order to steal his sheep. The younger brother is a
dreamer, whose “head is always in the stars.’’ Mioritza nestles in his
arms, and warns the boy about the evil doings soon to unfold, and begs
him to run away. But, in tones as lyrical as they are tragic, the young
poet-shepherd tells his beloved Mioritza to go see his mother after he is
killed, and to tell her that he didn’t really die, that he married the moon
instead, and that all the stars were at the wedding. The boy then tells
Mioritza the name of each star, where it came from, and what its job is,
just in case the mother, who is not easily fooled, wants to know names
and faces. Before morning, the older brothers murder the young shep¬
herd, as planned. There is no attempt to resist, no counterplot, no new
deviousness. Fate unfolds as foretold. The moon has a new husband, and
the story must be known.
Mioritza wanders, looking for the boy’s mother. But she tells everyone
along the way the story as well. The murder was really a wedding, the boy
married the moon, and all the stars were present. She names each star
and explains where it came from. The Pleiades are bad girls who swept
dust into the eyes of the sun. The Little Dipper feeds kind milk to the
poor because it had once been an evil Titan who wasted his gold. Venus
was once a vain queen who loved an evil angel. The circle of Orion is
made of girls who can’t stop dancing. There are carpenters, witches, and
160
PFITZNER: “HAPPY BABEL?” TRANSLATION IN EUROPE 161
smiths up there, worlds of people transformed and made forever exem¬

plary. Mioritza knows everyone in the sky. She never tires of the story.
She laments the death of her beloved with stories of the origin of the
worlds.
Her wandering takes her across the rivers of the Carpathian moun¬
tains to the Black Sea, a path that describes the natural border of Roma¬
nia. Her migration defines the space of the people, a space the Roma¬
nian poet Lucian Blaga called “mioritic.” Mioritza herself is the moving
border of the nation, a storytelling border whose story is borderless and
cosmic. She calls into being a place and a people that she circumscribes
with narrative.”1
The tale of Mioritza, here in Codrescu’s version, is “Romania’s

most enduring cultural text.”- A fundamental component of Roma¬
nian national and cultural identity, it serves as the founding myth
of Romania, construing both its origin and its destiny. Romanians
recognize themselves and their nation in the story: Mioritza epito¬
mizes their resilience in the face of occupation and aggression, hu¬
miliation and violence throughout their tormented history, a resil¬
ience that is coupled with and arises from a certain fatalistic streak.
The young shepherd’s murder constitutes yet another expulsion
from Paradise, yet another original sin. As a virtual big bang it calls
into existence time, societal order, a country and a culture, a people
and their history.
More than the young shepherd’s actual fate, it is Mioritza’s telling
of the tale that establishes Romania, a text inscribed by and ascribed
to the Romanian language. The wandering ewe draws an invisible
border, and the resulting “mioritic space” outlines “a geography of
the Romanian poetic imagination.”3 Her continual retelling sets up
a raise en abime: the tale I have related here is that of Codrescu, is
that of the old Romanian shepherd, is that of Mioritza, is that of
the young brother. The fable has been translated from Romanian to
“Sheep,” then again to Romanian, from Romanian to English, from
myth to theory.
En route, Mioritza’s story transforms everyone she tells it to. Every¬
one she meets turns into a Romanian, for it is this myth and the
shared knowledge of it that makes a Romanian a Romanian. Hence
storytellers like Mioritza, like Codrescu, like this author, “Romani¬
ans” ourselves, have produced innumerable compatriots in passing.
By retelling this tale, we have ensured the survival and transmission
of the myth and have contributed to the spiritual and cultural prolif¬
eration of Romania.
Had Mioritza continued her journey across the continent, all of
Europe might be Romanian today: Athens, Sarajevo, Barcelona,
Paris, Berlin, Bratislava-Helsinki. But other lands in other parts have

had their own Mioritzas-storytellers and chroniclers who, in their
own stories, have captured the concrete and conceptual horizons of
their cultures. Etched into national collective memories, the differ¬
ent stories, myths, legends, and fables distinguish the different civili¬
zations and peoples. Robin Hood, for example, is an English legend,
the Lorelei is German, and fairy tales about the Baba Yaga witch are
usually from Russia. Some stories, such as that of Little Red Riding
Hood, have transcended linguistic and ethnic boundaries as well as
geographical borders, and are therefore shared property. Le petit
chaperon rouge is known in Charles Perrault’s version, whereas Rotkdpp-
chen was immortalized by the Brothers Grimm.
Just as the Grimm brothers supposedly roamed and collected sto¬
ries,4 just as Mioritza kept telling her tale, storytellers everywhere
have been charting their own territory. Sometimes some sheep wan¬
der off to graze on neighboring meadows, adapting and modifying
their foreign stories for consumption at home. Sometimes what they
deem their own cultural heritage turns out to have been in transla¬
tion already: Perrault’s Le petit chaperon rouge, for example, was in¬
cluded in the Grimm’s national storytelling project Kinder- und
Hausmdrchen in the guise of a German folktale. Sometimes transla¬
tions have become such literary milestones that the existence of an
original is commonly forgotten altogether, as in the case of the cler¬
gyman Konrad’s Rolandslied (1170), a translation of the Chanson de
Roland.
Everywhere in Europe they are out in the pastures, those sheep-
translators, browsing foreign grasslands, picking up foreign tales,
making them their own. Just as Mioritza demarcated Romania with
her story of sin and redemption, translators have circumscribed Eu¬
rope by translating. Through their art they have created it as a cul¬
tural space, as a translating and as a translated continent. Its trans¬
lated essence has defined Europe and set it off from other
hemispheres. Translations have also spun a net of inner coherence:
shared stories connect the distinct and yet related cultures that in¬
habit Europe.
Translation, and the curiosity and appreciation of otherness it
presupposes, has served as a continual impetus for literature. In fact
some translations triggered new literary movements: the emergence
of the conte fantastique, for example, was owed to the translation of
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales; French romanticism resulted from Ma¬
dame de Stael’s and other translations of German romantic authors;
translating Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry inspired the symbolist move¬
ment; and the French versions of Freud’s theories put the surrealists
onto the scene. Shakespeare’s plays are classics in many national tra¬
ditions, such as in the German translations by Ludwig Tieck and
Friedrich Schlegel, and he is also considered “Poland’s National
Poet.’’5 Translations of Lev Tolstoy’s works belong to our literary
canons just as renderings of texts by Emile Zola, Samuel Beckett,
and Arundhati Roy do. Some of the greatest thinkers and writers of
all times have been translators as well, e.g., Gotthold Ephraim Les¬
sing, Paul Auster, and 2002 Nobel Prize laureate Imre Kertesz. Being
translated is a sure indication of success as well; even a writer of
Friedrich Nietzsche’s renown was eager to see his texts translated
into French, for that would make him “a properly European
writer.”6 Martin Luther’s rendition of the Bible is commonly cred¬
ited with instituting a modern German language and thereby pre¬
paring the ground for a unified German nation, a feat of political
and historical import indeed.
While translation may be viewed as a peaceful variant of Europe’s
history of conquest and annexation, it is also a gesture of curiosity
and understanding, of reaching out rather than aggressing, a stance
that is inclusive rather than divisive. And yet, if translation is the es¬
sential European practice, how then could Europe have been the
theater of so many devastating wars? How could the atrocities of the
two world v/ars have been possible? How could the Holocaust have
been allowed to happen? In Alexis Nouss’s words:
si la vocation naturelle de l’Europe est de nourrir une culture de traduc¬

tion, une culture en traduction, pourquoi et comment a-t-elle radicale-
ment pu faillir a sa mission, trahir son essence, ce qu’elle fit il y a un
demi-siecle? Quelle en est 1’implication quant a la verite ou l'authentic-
ite d’une telle dimension traductive?7
It is no surprise that Nouss formulated this question in an essay

on the poet Paul Celan. After all, Celan’s poetry is a response to a
similar query, which pervaded poetry and other arts in the decades
following World War Two. It is a coming to terms with Theodor
Adorno’s postulate that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Precluding the implicit question, however, Adorno proffers a solu¬
tion: the suspension of poetic and thence of all artistic creation. A
solution, though, which for Celan isn’t one. On the contrary—in a
true proliferation of poems Celan proposed a poetics that, while
being highly autobiographic and concrete, constantly reflected on
language and on poetry itself. His is a translatory stance. An ac¬
claimed translator and multilingual writer, he straddled several liter¬
ary, cultural, and linguistic traditions, fusing them into one new po¬
etic language.8 Therefore, translation for Celan was not only a
historic task,9 it was the only possible way to salvage poetry. Poetry’s
response to Auschwitz, then, was Babel, and the redemption for the
Holocaust was the coexistence and recreation of all languages in
one. But if poetry’s salvation was translation, in all its manifestations,
what does this mean for the art of translation? How did translation
fail to prevent Auschwitz? If translation is a solution for poetry, what
then is the solution for translation?
The answer to these questions has been enacted and put into
practice in the aftermath of World War Two. While translation and
poetry are indeed related, translation has an additional pragmatic
and political dimension that had not been actualized before. This
function is especially evident in its oral form, that of interpretation,
and most specifically in simultaneous interpretation, which has
gained an unprecedented importance in international and political
relations. The hrst instance of large-scale, organized simultaneous
interpretation, supplemented by other forms of interpreting and
translating, occurred during the Nuremberg Trial, which took place
from November 1945 until August 1946. The trial was held in Ger¬
man, English, Russian, and French; “multilingual instantaneous in¬
terpretation” was an integral, structural part of the proceedings and
an essential factor in its planning and its success.10 Some three hun¬
dred translators and interpreters were used during the course of the
tribunal.11 Questions and testimony were transposed in real time,
which enabled allied justices to try and convict twenty-two leading
Nazi commanders. Political and military officials were held interna¬
tionally accountable for their actions, and the concepts of war crime
and genocide were defined for the very hrst time. Nuremberg was
certainly “an exemplary—and almost unparalleled—instance of
human and technical triumph over the linguistic obstacles that can
otherwise impede the implementation of the loftiest sentiments of
fairness.”12 The intensity of the deliberations, documented in pho¬
tographs and written accounts, with defendants and prosecutors,
court staff and lawyers, interpreters and their supervisors crowded
into the courtroom, make it seem as if not only the Nazis were on
trial. Nuremberg made clear that humanity and the humanities had
failed. Translation as an art had not delivered upon its seeming
promise. laterally brought to court, translation was forced to assume
a new, decisive role.
Since then oral translation has been a recognized profession, and
simultaneous interpretation has become part of any interpreter’s
training. Interpreting has made translation, and the translator, audi¬
ble and visible,13 a tangible authority in the courtroom or in the con¬
ference booth. “Unlike translators, interpreters are seen by their
customers. They make face-to-face communication possible. They

identify with the speaker by speaking in the first person. They pre¬
sent the speaker’s ideas and convictions with the same intensity and
the same shades of meaning.”14 This human presence renders the
different parties seemingly impartially. It allows for immediate com¬
munication. It was simultaneous interpretation that has enabled in¬
ternational accountability. As a political and judicial tool it has con¬
ditioned exchange and exchanges in areas as diverse as business,
politics, technology, culture, and ecology.
In 1946 simultaneous interpretation was adopted for all sessions
of the United Nations General Assembly,15 and subsequently by
many other international organizations. Translation, in all its forms,
has been practiced in the European Economic Community since its
inception in 1957, and is being continued in today’s European
Union, which was renamed and reconfigured in the Maastricht
Treaty in 1993 and in other agreements. At present, the EU unites
as many as fifteen member states, with several candidates bidding
for admission. EU institutions and politics have evolved into such a
ubiquitous fact of everyday life, that for many Europeans, in particu¬
lar the French, the term Europe today stands for the European
Union. Europe also means the political, economic, and social prem¬
ises at the core of the EU’s structure as well as a somewhat idealized,
unspecific set of European values and ideas that is continually being
renegotiated.
The principle of translation is one of these premises: based on
the explicit understanding that language is a prime characteristic of
personal and national identity, the languages of Europe are re¬
garded as an immense, multiform cultural heritage which has been
entrusted to the care of all Europeans.16 Since multilingualism is the
“linchpin” of the European Union, it is therefore EU policy that the
official language of each member country is an official and working
language of the European Union, regardless of geographical size,
economical and political status or number of inhabitants. ELT bodies
may be addressed in any of the official languages and must be ac¬
knowledged in that same language. According to the “policy of the
(now) twelve originals,”17 documents are prepared in all of the lan¬
guages, and “all language versions of the EU’s legal instruments
have equal legal force.”18 Each version is therefore regarded as an
original. This, naturally, is more of a political than a practicable real¬
ity: original documents are translated which then serve as originals
themselves.19 For this purpose, the European Union employs an
army of full-time translators, supplemented by free-lance translators
in their respective countries. The Translation Service of the Euro-
pean Commission is the biggest one in Europe and the world, and
uses up about half of the EC’s budget,20 or 0.8% of that of the entire
EU.21 Of the twenty-seven languages spoken in the countries of the
European Union twelve are official and eleven are working lan¬
guages of the EU.22 This results in 110 language permutations for
translation and interpreting purposes.23 Over 1,200,000 pages are
translated each year, a stack of paper more than 100 meters high.
This “tower of paper”24 seems to measure up to the tower of Babel,
and yet is supposed to redeem it.
Translation provides the interior, communicative structure for the
workings of the European Union, puts members on an equal footing
and overrides the established hierarchies of languages, where, like a
currency,25 smaller countries with “smaller” languages are of lesser
market value than “greater” ones. Greater languages usually mean
“greater” literatures and are translated more than smaller ones. Yet
the specific worth of a language is impossible to determine; one lan¬
guage can only be expressed by another one, just as one currency
can only be expressed in another currency.20
As of 1 January 2002 the majority of EU members have adopted a
common vehicular “language,” a common currency.27 As a sort of
translated currency, or an Esperanto of a currency, the euro, has
made Europe and the European Union tangible. With its common
design on one side of the coins and the nationally distinct designs
on the reverse, the euro inadvertently and gradually introduces the
other countries into every citizen’s wallets and pockets. The foreign
coins exemplify the (co) existence of languages and cultures in Eu¬
rope. While of course still just a currency, the euro is also a powerful
idiom: it may be the most important public symbol of a common
European identity and is intended as such.28 While everyone in Eu¬
roland had to give up a material token of it, their national and eth¬
nic identities have remained unscathed.
Rather than eroding it, contact confirms one’s own identity, for,
as translation critic Henri Meschonnic posits, “l’identite advient par
l’alterite au lieu de s’y opposer” [identity comes from otherness in¬
stead of being opposed to it].29 Flexible and relative, identity arises
from and is reinforced in interaction rather than separation. It
would be illusory of course to expect everyone to study one anoth¬
er’s languages. In the open multicultural Europe Umberto Eco envi¬
sions, translation and other forms of cross-cultural communication
would be part of a common consciousness:
Polyglot Europe will not be a continent where individuals converse flu-

endy in all the other languages; in the best of cases, it could be a conti-
nent where differences of language are no longer barriers to communi¬

cation, where people can meet each other and speak together, each in
his or her own tongue, understanding, as best they can, the speech of
others. In this way, even those who never learn to speak another lan¬
guage fluently could still participate in its particular genius, catching a
glimpse of the particular cultural universe that every individual ex¬
presses each time he or she speaks the language of his or her ancestors
and his or her tradition.30
By acquiring new languages, then, for passive understanding rather

than for active use, says Eco, Europeans would learn to appreciate
one another’s culture, history, and idiosyncrasies. The open-minded,
educated citizen Eco proposes, who can converse across linguistic
and cultural boundaries, would be a sort of “ideal European,” the
exact opposite of the proverbial “ugly American.”31
Meanwhile, some Europeans are apprehensive of losing their cul¬
tural peculiarities. Time and again such fears bubble up in fierce
disputes over beer, cheese, or toilet bowl shapes. At the same time
Europeans have slowly come together through joint study programs
and joint ventures as well as through trade, travel, and television.32
Foreign exposure has increased in the past decades, especially on
the air:33 TV programs such as the German detective series “Der¬
rick” have long become European staples, as have international
game shows and the bilingual French-German television channel
Arte. The decades-old annual Eurovision song contest has fascinated
viewers for its tallying of points in English and French and for the
different countries represented. It is a fitting metaphor for the
peaceful competition of cultures and languages and their world¬
views. At the Eurovision this friendly competition is redecided every
year and is therefore never final.
Indeed cultural differences should be regarded as assets—and
can be very entertaining, such as the ones portrayed in this classic
hyperbole:
In the European heaven the cooks would be French, the policemen Brit¬
ish, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian and the whole system
would be run by the Swiss. But in the European hell the cooks would be
British, the policemen German, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss
and the system would be run by the Italians.34
When this joke (or versions of it) first started circulating, the Euro¬
pean Union and its unified currency were only fictions. In the mean¬
time, this whimsical fantasy of Europe has proved to bear a grain of
truth. Ideally the European Union would bring out the best in one
another and pool particular strengths and expertise for a common

good. This delicately balanced, constantly renegotiated, entity that
is the European Union is certainly no “European hell.” It is no “Eu¬
ropean heaven” either. Translations have eased the fear of it: in to¬
day’s Europe Babel and everything it entailed is no longer a night¬
mare. The confusion of languages is no longer a punishment, said
Roland Barthes, no, “c’est Babel heureuse.”35
It owes its happiness to a kind of subject that finds its pleasure not in
the fulfillment of a phantasy [sic] of total identity and communal and
communicative homogeneity but in difference, for example, in the co¬
habitation of different languages rather than their unification.36
This almost Utopian formula will be put to the test as more and
more countries join the European Union, among them Romania.
New cultural, historical, and political backgrounds will come into
play as well as new linguistic dimensions. As the EU is still enlarging,
an official brochure foresees this for the future:
When today’s schoolchildren become adults, they may live in a Euro¬

pean Union compromising 30 or more countries, with more than 20 lan¬
guages, a unique blend of cutlures, and a sense of solidarity embracing
more than 500 million people.37
Despite this optimism, it remains to be seen if all around intertrans¬

lation will torpedo the EU’s viability. With the ever greater number
of languages, can translation continue to drive the EU or will it
rather stifle its efficiency? Is it hubris, too, to want to counter lan¬
guage confusion through translations? Will this (European) tower
of translations hold up or will it end up crumbling as the Tower of
Babel did?
Epilogue
In the fall of 2001 a new French translation of the Bible was pub¬
lished in Paris.38 It is the result of the work of six years and of fifty
poets, Bible scholars, writers, and exegetes. La Bible Nouvelle reenacts
a protestant gesture that eluded France before and prevented it
from having its own seminal, authoritative Bible. Still, it may never
become what Martin Luther’s version has been for the Germans, or
what the King James Bible is for the Anglophone world. After all,
the French had other and earlier works that galvanized their litera¬
ture and identity the way Bible translations did in some countries.
Yet this replicated act of liberation and assertion, this enormous col¬
lective effort, not only makes a stand for translation in French cul¬
ture. Once more it puts into focus this Ur-text that has shaped the
languages, cultures, and politics of the Occident, of Europe, in dif¬
ferent versions. The timing of the project curiously coincides with
the introduction of the new currency within the EU. It counterbal¬
ances the materialistic nature of the euro. The concurrence of the
new French Bible and of the euro is a reminder that translation
must operate on two levels: as a persuasive, subtle, and intellectual
connector of cultures but also a political and judicial tool. In the
European Union today translation is no longer only the pastime of
a few intellectuals; it is a decreed instrument, a tradition made politi¬
cal imperative. While literary translation and technical translation
are regarded as disparate in nature, it is precisely in the convergence
of literature and politics, in the double and joint effort of all do¬
mains, that translation can fulfill its mission.
Happy Babel? For the moment: yes, indeed. Pour l’instant, oui, en
effet. Im Moment jedenfalls: Ja, unbedingt.
Notes
The epigraph is from Henri Meschonnic, Poetique du traduire (Paris: Verdier, 1999), 32.
Europe is, of course, an ambiguous, or in Dimitris Eleftheriotis’s words, “slippery,” term. Jac¬
ques Derrida concurs that “on ne sail plus tres bien ce qui s’appelle ainsi. A quel concept, en
effet, a quel individu reel, a quelle entite singuliere assigner ce nom aujourd’hui? Qui en
dessinera les frontieres?” [one doesn’t know very well anymore what is called such. Which
concept, really, which real individual, which singular entity should be assigned this name now¬
adays? Who is going to draw its borders?]. Jacques Derrida, L’autre cap suivi de la democratic
ajoum.ee (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991), 11-12; my translation. Again Eleftheriotis: “With
every effort made to pin down its meaning(s), new sets of excluded concepts, overlooked rela¬
tions and forgotten histories surface." Dimitris Eleftheriotis, Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies
of Texts, Contexts and Erameworks (New York: Continuum, 2001), 1. Parting from a rather tradi¬
tional understanding of the concept, which designates the geographical continent as well as
the cultural and political space, I demonstrate that it is the tradition and continued activity of
translation that defines Europe.
1. Andrei Codrescu, The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape (Reading, Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1990), 1-2. “Mioritza” means, literally, lamb, from “mioara”—sheep. The
ballad is known in different versions in Bessarabia, the Banat, Transsylvania, Moldavia, and
Muntenia, and is sung and presented mostly by shepherds. Compare also versions by Mircea
Eliade and others.
2. Richard Collins, “Andrei Codrescu’s Mioritic Space,” MELUS 23, no. 3 (1999): 83.
3. Ibid.
4. “The idea that the Grimms themselves traipsed through the countryside sitting at the
feet of doughty peasant tale tellers is pure fiction.” Michael Bacher, in Matthias Konzett, ed.,
Encyclopedia of German Literature. Vol. 1: A-l (Chicago: Dearborn, 2000), 378. The myth of the
wandering Grimm brothers, then, is a fairy tale in itself. Rather, their informants, among
them many French Huguenots, came to visit them in their offices. likewise the itinerant trans¬
lators and storytellers in tihs essay merely are metaphorical; writers and translators often work
solely at their desks.
5. Jerzy Sito, “Shakespeare, Poland’s National Poet,” Delos, No. 3 (1969), 147.
6. Anthony Pym, “Getting Translated; Nietzsche’s Panama Canal,” in Europe et traduction,
ed. Michel Ballard (Arras: Artois Presses Llniversite; Ottawa: Presses de l’Universite d Ottawa,
1998), 181.
7. [I]f it is Europe’s natural vocation to nurture a culture of translation, a culture in trans¬
lation, why and how could she so radically fail her mission, betray her essence, which she did
half a century ago? What does this imply for the truth or athenticity of such a translatory
dimension? Alexis Nouss, “La traduction comme Ethos europeen: Le cas de Paul Celan,” Eu¬
rope et traduction, ed. Ballard, 248; my translation.
8. In his dual work as a translator and poet, Paul Celan personified what Yves Bonnefoy
described as a community of translators and poets. The parallel between the two goes back to
a similar undertaking. See Yves Bonnefoy, La communaute des traducteurs (Strasbourg: Presses
Universitaires, 2000), 38.
9. Nouss, “Traduction,” 248.
10. The Nuremberg Trial was followed by twelve subsequent so-called Proceedings from
1946 until 1949, which were held only in German and English. For a detailed account of the
organization of the trial, the technical and technological challenges as well as the role of inter¬
preting, see Francesca Gaiba, The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: The Nuremberg Trial (Ot¬
tawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1998). See also Ruth Morris, “Justice in Four Languages or
‘Interpreters and Mistresses,’” review of Gaiba’s The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation, in
Communicate! 6 (2000): 1. http://www.aiic.net/ViewPage.cfm/page238.htm
11. Several of the interpreters recruited and trained for the trial were expatriate Germans,
mostly Jews (such as Wolfe Frank and Eva Colvin). At times defendants and supervisors would
assist the relatively inexperienced interpreters in finding the right term. In particular, Her¬
mann Goring is reported to have been very aware of the role of the interpreting process and
tried to use it to his advantage. One of the expatriates turned interpreter was Wolfgang Hild-
esheimer, who became one of the most noted and prolific German-language writers of the
postwar period.
12. Morris, “Justice,” 6.
13. Nonetheless, the interpreter usually remains nameless, and unacknowledged, a plight
he shares with the translator. See, for example, Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A
History of Translation (New York; Routledge, 1995).
14. Translation and Interpreting: Languages in Action (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publi¬
cations of the European Communities, 2001), 6.
15. Jesus Baigorri-Jalon, “Bridging the Language Gap at the United Nations,” UNChronicle
37, no. 1 (2000). http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle
16. Der Ubersetzungdienst der Ettropaischen Kommission, So arbeitet eine vielsprachige Ge-
meinschaft (Luxembourg: Amt fur amtliche Veroffentlichungen der Ettropaischen Gemein-
schaften, 1998), 4.
17. Franz-Josef M. Wilms, “Intelligente Textvorbereitung und rechnergestiitzte Ubersetzun-
gshilfen: Chancen fur produktiveres Ubersetzen?” in Ubersetzungswissenschaft: Ergebnisse und
Perspektiven, ed. Reiner Arntz and Gisela Thome (Tubingen: Narr, 1990), 499.
18. Publication of the Translation Service of the European Commission, 1. http://europa.
eu.int/comm/translation/en/eyl/en.pdf
19. This in itself undermines the concept of original and translation.
20. Anne-Marie Loffler-Laurian, “La traduction automatique: Bref historique,” in La tra¬
duction plurielle, ed. Michel Ballard (Lille: Presses Universitaires, 1990), 145.
21. An expenditure about which this same brochure comments: “Multilingualism costs
each European citizen only two euros a year.” See Publication of the Translation Service of
the European Commission, 5.
22. The official languages are Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Ital¬
ian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Irish (Gaelic, “Gaeilge”) is regarded as an official lan¬
guage, where primary legislation (i.e., the Treaties) is concerned, but is not a working language
of the EU. European Union, Translation and Enlargement. “Why do we need translators? Multilin¬
gualism in the EU." http://europa.eu.int/translation__enlargement/multilingualism_en.htm
23. Colette Touitou-Benitah, “Le modele de la traduction en Europe: Realites et potential¬
ity,” in Europe et traduction, ed. Ballard, 361.
24. For the translator, not all documents produced and commissioned for translation seem
to be of parucular relevance or importance. The EU may be translating more than necessary.
See Publication of the Translation Service of the European Commission, 2.
25. Romul Munteanu, “Translation, Mediation, Necessity,” Cahiers Roumains d’Etudes Litter-
aires 3 (1986): 35.
26. Daniel Mercier, “Une "mesure commune’ des langues europeennes a Page classique,”
in Europe et traduction, ed. Ballard, 108.
27. EU members were entitled to opt out of the monetary union, but in other issues, such
as translation, no compromises were allowed.
28. Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (New York:
Roudedge, 2000), 115.
29. Henri Meschonnic. “Sur l’importance d’une poetique de la traduction,” Etudes de Let-
tres 4 (1989): 6.
30. Umberto Eco, In Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1995), 350-51.
31. This is a concept open-minded, educated Americans have coined for those of their
compatriots who travel overseas (namely to Europe) and behave starkly insensitive toward cul¬
tural and linguistic differences.
32. The French motion picture L’aubergeespagnole (directed by Cedric Klapisch, 2002) con¬
denses the European Union into a group of ERASMUS students from France, the United
Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Denmark sharing an apartment in Barcelona.
The film depicts everyday life, including romance, study, cultural conflicts, and subtly ad¬
dresses stereotypes. The students mostly interact in English or Spanish but also in their native
languages, which are subtitled throughout the picture. Barcelona, to their surprise, is Catalan
and so professors and comrades speak that language rather than Spanish. In this particular
episode the film draws attention to the role of regional and linguistic identity, which may
come to the fore in a unified Europe more than within a nation state.
33. Shalini Venturelli has underlined the importance of adequate information and ex¬
change of information for a European identity. See “The Information Society,” in Europe’s
Ambiguous Unity—Conflict and Consensus in the Post-Maastricht Era, ed. Alan W. Cafruny and Carl
Lankowski (Boulder, Colo.: Rienner, 1997), 85-107.
34. Nigel Reeves, “Presidential Address ATG May 13 1989 given at the joint MLA/ATG
AGM: 1992 and the Linguist,” Modem Languages 70, no. 3 (1989): 131.
35. Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), 10.
36. Rainer Nageie, Echoes of Translation: Reading between Texts (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hop¬
kins University Press, 1997), 2.
37. European Commission. Directorate-General for Press and Communication, 'The Euro¬
pean Union: Still Enlarging (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European
Communities, 2001), 4.
38. Frederic Boyer, ed., La Bible Nouvelle (Paris: Bayard, 2001).
(Continu , vom front flap)
One of the Jfarrnost practitioners of

translation theory, awrence Venuti, opens
this discussion with an essay on the creation
of value through the retranslation of the
foreign. He examines the potential conflict
of agency between institutions that sponsor
and promote the retranslation of “classic”
works and the integrity of the translator.
The cultural-political ends of translation are
further pursued in the essays by De Julio,
von Flotow, and Koch. The question of
translatability itself is addressed by Fried¬
man, Giacoppe, and Durrani, and its con¬
comitant problematics celebrated by Scott
in her essay on the translation of myth. Both
Merrill and Pfitzner focus on the agency of
the translator per se, but with very different
conclusions. Whereas Merrill lays bare the
author/ity of the translator, Pfitzner ap¬
plauds the joie de traduire of the multilin¬
gual society of the European Union.
The essays in the volume all place them¬
selves within the debate that has been re¬
fired by Jacques Derrida: namely, do we as
translators lay bare our role as carriers of
meaning, and then must we not also do this
with both a debt to an “ethics of the word”
and a consciousness of ourselves as other?
About the Editor
Katherine M. Faull is a professor of

German and director of the Program in
Comparative Humanities at Bucknell Uni¬
versity. She publishes widely in the fields
of history and philosophy of religion, and
edited Anthropology and the German En¬
lightenment: Perspectives on Humanity
(Bucknell Review, 38:2,1995).
ISBN 0-8387-5581-X
ISSN 0007-2869
Printed in the U.S.A.
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction Katherine M. Faull
Retranslations: The Creation of Value Lawrence Venuti

Schlafes Bruder Osman Durrani
Translating Myth: The Task of Speaking

Time and Space Jill Scott
Intracultural Translations: Validating

Regional Identities in Nineteenth-
Century German Realism Arne Koch
Sacrificing Sense to Sound: Mimetic

Translation and Feminist Writing Luise von Flotow
Names in Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes

and Close Range: Wyoming Stories and
Their Hebrew Translation Sara Friedman
“The Task of the Translator” in Garcia

Marquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude and Brossard’s Mauve Desert Monika Giacoppe
The Death of the Authors a.k.a. Twilight

of the Translators Christi Ann Merrill
Contemporary French Poetry

and Translation Maryann De Julio
“Happy Babel?” Translation in Europe Ina Pfitzner
Bucknell University Press

On the Web at http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/univ_press/
SBN 0-8387-5581-X
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91 780838 755815

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