Translation Studies

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Introduction
Poetry and translation

Lawrence Venuti

To cite this article: Lawrence Venuti (2011) Introduction, Translation Studies, 4:2, 127-132, DOI:
10.1080/14781700.2011.560014

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Translation Studies,
Vol. 4, No. 2, 2011, 127
132

Introduction
Poetry and translation
Lawrence Venuti

Department of English, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA

Today poetry may well be the least translated literary genre, no matter where the
translating literature ranks in the global hierarchy of symbolic capital that is so
unevenly distributed among national literary traditions (see Casanova 2004). Because
the hegemonic anglophone cultures have long translated less, their figures for poetry
offer no surprise (Venuti 2008, 11
12). Every spring Poets House in New York City
showcases most books of poetry published in the United States during the previous
year, building an online bibliography that enables a comprehensive view of the
contemporary scene. Translations comprise a tiny fraction of total annual output,
hovering at 5
8%. In 2009 US publishers brought out approximately 2,200 books of
poetry, but only about 115 were translations (just over 5.2%). Much lower in the
global cultural hierarchy, in Slovenia, for instance, the situation is not much better,
even if the considerably lower figures reflect the smaller size of the publishing industry.
In 2009 Slovenian publishers brought out approximately 300 books of poetry,
including 33 translations (11%) (Kastelic 2010). In a culture like Italy, where since the
1980s translations have constituted 20
26% of new titles each year, more poetry is
translated, but again the percentage is small compared to native production: in 2009
Italian publishers brought out 3,769 books of poetry, which included 520 translations
(13.77%) (Peresson and Mussinelli 2009; Mondadori’s publicity department provided
the 2009 data). If in sheer quantitative terms poetry translation appears to be such a
marginal genre in the West (and no doubt in other locations as well), why should we
bother to devote a special issue to the study of it?
The marginality is in fact the first reason to move poetry closer to the center of
translation studies. Poetry translation attracts a narrow audience and therefore
occupies a tenuous position in the process of commodification that allows other
literary genres, notably the novel, to become lucrative investments on the foreign
rights market. In the US most poetry translations are issued by small and university
presses, limiting their print run and distribution and making many of them ephemeral
publications. These factors, as Pierre Bourdieu observes of poetry in general, turn its
translation into ‘‘the disinterested activity par excellence’’, determining that it will
invite not only ‘‘charismatic legitimation’’ but also ‘‘a succession of successful or
abortive revolutions’’ as translators seek to garner ‘‘poetic legitimacy’’ by distinguish-
ing their work (Bourdieu 1993, 51). Released from the constraint to turn a profit,
poetry translation is more likely to encourage experimental strategies that can reveal
what is unique about translation as a linguistic and cultural practice.
ISSN 1478-1700 print/ISSN 1751-2921 online
# 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2011.560014
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128 Lawrence Venuti

It is the uniqueness of poetry as a form of language use that occasions any such
revelations. ‘‘The poem,’’ argues Alain Badiou, ‘‘does not consist in communication’’
because it performs two operations: a ‘‘subtraction’’ from ‘‘objective reality’’,
whereby the poem ‘‘declares its own universe’’ and ‘‘utters being, or the idea, at the
very point where the object has vanished’’, and a ‘‘dissemination’’ which ‘‘aims to
dissolve the object through an infinite metaphorical distribution’’, so that ‘‘no sooner
is it mentioned than the object migrates elsewhere within meaning’’ through ‘‘an
excessive equivalence to other objects’’ (Badiou 2004, 233, 236
7). To translate a
poem, then, regardless of the language, culture, or historical moment, has often meant
to create a poem in the receiving situation, to cultivate poetic effects that may seek to
maintain an equivalence to the source text but that fall short of and exceed it because
the translation is written in a different language for a different culture. The poem that
is the object of translation inevitably vanishes during the translation process, replaced
by a network of signification
intertextual, interdiscursive, intersemiotic
that is
rooted mainly in the receiving situation. Hence poetry translation tends to release
language from the narrowly defined communicative function that most translations
are assumed to serve, whether the genre of their source texts is technical, pragmatic, or
humanistic
namely, the communication of a formal or semantic invariant contained
in the source text.
The articles I have gathered here contest this instrumental model by setting out
instead from an understanding of translation that is hermeneutic, translation
conceived not as the reproduction of an unchanging textual essence but as an act
of interpreting a text that is variable in form and content. In each case, even when the
translation under examination is governed by some concept of equivalence, the
translator’s verbal choices are treated as interpretive moves that vary the source text
according to a complex set of factors that include knowledge of the source language
and culture but also values, beliefs and representations that circulate in the
translating language and culture during a particular period. Ruth J. Owen documents
how between 1967 and 1990 the widely distributed magazine Poesiealbum presented
opportunities to evade censorship in the German Democratic Republic by selecting
certain foreign poetries for German translation and by rendering them so as to
criticize East German society. Eric Keenaghan analyzes how a queer ethics, entailing
a recognition of minority sexual identities that fosters and sustains a community, is
foreclosed or enacted in several English translations of the Spanish poet Luis
Cernuda’s work, all published after his death in 1963. Josef Horáček indicates the
modernist avant-garde materials that inform the US poet Jerome Rothenberg’s
versions of Native American oral literatures during the 1970s, interpretations that
put into question the universalizing tendency of Rothenberg’s own commentary by
foregrounding performance. Zoë Skoulding considers how the relations between
place and language are reinterpreted through translation in the British experimen-
talist Geraldine Monk’s 2005 collection Escafeld Hangings, wherein the reader is
compelled to translate between different dialects and moments in the history of
Sheffield, and the limits of anglophone nationalism as well as of the global hegemony
of English are exposed. To address poetry and translation confirms the methodo-
logical ineffectiveness of instrumentalist thinking by showing that translation
communicates not the source text, but an interpretation of it, one among different
possibilities, which can go on to serve multiple functions, literary and cultural, social
and political.
 Translation Studies 129

Clearly, I am formulating a hermeneutic model of translation that diverges

significantly from prevalent concepts of the ‘‘hermeneutic’’. From my point of view,
Jerome McGann’s distinction between ‘‘hermeneutic’’ and ‘‘constructivist’’ or
‘‘radial’’ kinds of reading is dubious and ultimately collapses in his exposition
(McGann 1991, 104). He calls the former ‘‘an act of decoding’’, the latter ‘‘an act of
constructing’’, yet ‘‘radial reading involves decoding one or more of the contexts that
interpenetrate the scripted and physical text’’ (ibid., 119). McGann wants to limit the
meaning of ‘‘hermeneutic’’ to ‘‘deciphering the linguistic text’’, where ‘‘linguistic’’
assumes a notion of the text as a container of stable meaning (ibid., 104). But he
makes clear that all reading is hermeneutic because it is indistinguishable from the
interpretive act of decoding. What he actually does is to broaden interpretation to
encompass the text as a material object. Thus he argues that texts possess ‘‘spatial
styles (or codes)’’; they are ‘‘visually and materially coded for different audiences and
different purposes’’; and a ‘‘critical edition’’ holds a ‘‘special hermeneutic advantage’’
in ‘‘allow[ing] one to imagine many possible states of the text’’, so that reading
must take into account textual editing, the ‘‘bibliographical codes’’ that are just as
constitutive of meaning as linguistic features (ibid., 115, 121, 122, 123). Karen
Emmerich establishes the importance of introducing this view into translation studies
by displaying how a particular edition of the source text
her case is the Greek poet
C.P. Cavafy’s unfinished work
inscribes an interpretation which then limits the
translator’s interpretive moves.
Behind McGann’s questionable notion of hermeneutic reading, I suggest, lies
the German tradition of hermeneutics, particularly as exemplified by Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s theory of interpretation. And McGann is right to oppose this tradition.
Gadamer promisingly describes translation as an interpretive act that is ‘‘not simply
reproduction’’ (Gadamer 1992, 386). Yet although he mentions ‘‘the fundamental
gulf between the two languages’’, admitting that the translator ‘‘is always in the
position of not really being able to express all the dimensions of his text’’, his account
assumes the instrumental model:

[T]he translator must translate the meaning to be understood into the context in which
the other speaker lives. This does not, of course, mean that he is at liberty to falsify the
meaning of what the other person says. Rather, the meaning must be preserved, but
since it must be understood within a new language world, it must establish its validity
within it in a new way. (Ibid., 384)

For Gadamer, the source text contains a semantic invariant that the translator must
transfer through the translation. He never clarifies how ‘‘meaning’’ can be
‘‘preserved’’ or its ‘‘validity’’ established ‘‘in a new way’’ except through a cursory
reference to his notion of ‘‘fusion of horizons’’ (ibid., 388). By ‘‘horizon’’ Gadamer
understands the different but overlapping presuppositions that gave rise to the
‘‘traditionary text’’ in the past, and that the interpreter brings to the task of
interpretation in the present, so that interpretation is a ‘‘relation of question and
answer’’ whereby the cultural difference of the text questions the interpreter, who in
turn is led to articulate ‘‘the question to which the meaning of a text is understood as
an answer’’ (ibid., 374
5). Meaning proceeds in one direction, however circuitously,
from tradition to the interpreter, inexplicably retaining its ‘‘fullness’’ despite the
‘‘changing process of understanding’’ (ibid., 373). Tradition escapes any questioning,
130 Lawrence Venuti

but its very dependence on later interpretation for its continuing relevance should
make any interpreter wary of putting the past or its value beyond question.
Gadamer’s hermeneutics is founded on an essentialism that represses the indetermi-
nacy of language, the transformative nature of interpretation, and the exclusions at
work in any construction of tradition (see Caputo 1989).
To advance the study of translation, we must not abandon the practice of
interpretation but rather reconceptualize the hermeneutic model so as to take such
points into consideration. Translation is an interpretive act that involves
what Jacques Derrida calls an ‘‘inscription’’: ‘‘the written origin: traced and hence-
forth inscribed in a system, in a figure which it no longer governs’’ (Derrida 1978,
115). The source text is always already mediated, whether read in the source language
or translated into the receiving language, and that mediation consists of an
interpretation that is itself determined by a network of signification beyond the
author’s control, whether in the source or the receiving culture. The source text can
never be viewed as strictly original, then, because the inescapable inscription
‘‘bring[s] the origin or a priori principles in relation to what exceeds them’’ (Gasché
1986, 161).
The inscription can be made more precise and turned into a serviceable tool both
to produce and to analyze translations by drawing on Charles Peirce’s notion of the
‘‘interpretant’’. Peirce makes clear that the interpretant constitutes a ‘‘mediating
representation’’ between a ‘‘sign’’ or signifier and its ‘‘object’’, where the object
is itself a representation, a content or signified (Peirce 1984, 53
4). In Peirce’s
semiotics, as Umberto Eco observes, ‘‘a sign can stand for something else to
somebody only because this ‘standing-for’ relation is mediated by an interpretant’’
(Eco 1976a, 15). Eco’s examples include a dictionary definition, an encyclopedia
entry, a visual image, or a translation into another language, showing that the
interpretant facilitates a semantic analysis: it is a code or theme that invests the sign
with a certain intelligibility by transforming it into another chain of signifiers (Eco
1976b, 1469; Eco 1976a, 70
1). Eco’s inclusion of a translation among his examples
can be misleading insofar as every translation requires the application of an
interpretant as a necessary condition of its existence: interpretants enable the
translator to turn the source text into the translation. With this qualification
interpretants can be seen as precipitating an endless chain of interpretants, codes
used to produce a translation but also to analyze the interpretants in practices like
translation.
The hermeneutic model I have rapidly sketched casts Clive Scott’s argument in a
different light. In theorizing reading as translation he discloses the process by which
an interpretation is inscribed in a text read or translated. He has not abandoned
interpretation but allowed ‘‘an autobiography of reading and associating’’ to become
a source of interpretants, so that Edward Thomas’s poem ‘‘Adlestrop’’ can be
meaningful to the ‘‘reader of Proust’’ through a scene from À la recherche du temps
perdu, and Rilke’s sonnet prompts Scott himself to create a visual analogue to the
acoustic dimension of the text. Yet his insistence on personalizing the interpretive
act, on expanding the range of interpretants to encompass autobiography and
performance, defers the question of value. To address this question is the project of
my own contribution. If we agree that a translation transforms the source text, then
evaluation cannot stop at a consideration of its relation to that text, but must explore
the manifold conditions
linguistic and discursive, cultural and social
that figure
 Translation Studies 131

into its interpretive inscription. These conditions are transindividual, situated in

communities and institutions, and they lead to a formulation of a translation ethics,
where the good is the creative and the innovative. Because translation traffics in
linguistic and cultural differences, it ought never to maintain the cultural and social
status quo but always to challenge it and, if the conditions are advantageous, to
inspire the development of new communities and institutions in the receiving
situation.
My overall aim has been to make translation the site of the most searching
thought about language, literature and culture while increasing our knowledge of
translation practices. The choice of a genre like poetry to stage this investigation, a
genre that retains a certain prestige despite its marginality in publishing and in
translation studies, was strategic. Perhaps that prestige can help to stimulate new
research in translation along similar lines, particularly the translation of text types
that are more central than poetry to intercultural exchange. We know more about
the translation of technical and pragmatic texts, where the interpretants tend to be
relatively limited to idiomatic usage, standardized terminologies and precisely
defined functions, than we do about the history and current state of humanistic
translation, translation in the full gamut of the arts and human sciences in such areas
as anthropology, art history, film, philosophy, political history and religion, where, as
with poetry, interpretants are constantly developing to reflect changing cultural and
social conditions. In the end, the question that this special issue poses is much
broader than the focus on poetry might suggest. I would phrase it thus: What might
the hermeneutic model bring to light about the translation of the forms and practices
by which most of us are likely to encounter other cultures?

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