Authorizing Translation

Authorizing Translation applies ground-breaking research on literary translation

to examine the intersection between Translation Studies and literary criticism,
rethinking ways in which analyzing translation and the authority of the translator
can provide nuanced micro and macro readings of literary work and the worlds
through which it moves. A substantial introduction surveys the field and suggests
possible avenues for future research, while six case-study-based chapters by a new
generation of Literature and Translation Studies scholars focus on the question of
authority by asking:

• Who authors translations?

• Who authorizes translations?
• What authority do translations have in different cultural contexts?
• What authority does Literary Translation Studies have as a field?

The hermeneutic role of the translator is explored through the literary periods
of Romanticism, Modernism, and Postmodernism, and through different cultures
and languages. The case studies focus on data-centered analysis of reviews of
translated literature, ultimately illustrating how the translator’s authority creates
and hybridizes literary cultures.
Authorizing Translation will be of interest to students and researchers of
Literary Translation and Translation Studies.

Michelle Woods is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New

York, New Paltz. She is the author of Translating Milan Kundera (2006), Censoring
Translation: Censorship, Theatre and the Politics of Translation (2012), and Kafka
Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka (2013).
The IATIS Yearbook
Series editor: Jenny Williams

The International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS)

is a worldwide forum designed to enable scholars from different regional and
disciplinary backgrounds to debate issues pertinent to translation and other forms
of intercultural communication.
The series aims to promote and disseminate innovative research, rigorous
scholarship and critical thinking in all areas of translation studies and intercultural
communication.

Authorizing Translation
Michelle Woods

Human Issues in Translation Technology

Dorothy Kenny
Authorizing Translation

Edited by Michelle Woods

First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies/IATIS
The right of Michelle Woods to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Permissions: Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders.
Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be
corrected in subsequent editions.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Woods, Michelle, 1972- editor.
Title: Authorizing translation / edited by Michelle Woods.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge,
[2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016020420| ISBN 9781138195776 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315638232 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting. | Literature—Translations—
History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PN241 .A887 2016 | DDC 418/.04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020420

ISBN: 978-1-138-19577-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-3156-3823-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
Contents

List of illustrations vi
Notes on contributors vii
Series editor’s preface x

Introduction 1
MICHELLE WOODS

1 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews: the rise of

readability 12
BRIAN JAMES BAER

2 Translating the translingual novel in early Turkish Republican

literature: the case of Sabahattin Ali 32
DAVID GRAMLING AND İLKER HEPKANER

3 The translator takes the stage: Clair in Crimp’s The City 47

GERALDINE BRODIE

4 Invisible man: sketches for a portrait of Mário Domingues,

intellectual and (pseudo)translator 61
ALEXANDRA LOPES

5 Pseudotranslation from Blackwood’s to Carlyle: Dousterswivel,

von Lauerwinkel, Teufelsdröckh 80
TOM TOREMANS

6 Finneganów tren, Da Capo al Finne, and Finnegans _ake:

Krzysztof Bartnicki, translation and authorship 96
JOHN KEARNS

Index 114
Illustrations

Figures
6.1 An example of the last pages of Bartnicki’s Da Capo al Finne 102
6.2 The opening page of Finnegans _ake 108

Tables
1.1 Languages of the source texts 14
1.2 Domains represented by the translated texts reviewed 15
1.3 Breakdown by gender of source text authors, translators,
and reviewers 16
Contributors

Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State
University. He is the author of Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis
of Post-Soviet Identity (2009) and Translation and the Making of Modern
Russian Literature (2015), as well as the editor of several volumes including
Beyond the Ivory Tower: Re-thinking Translation Pedagogy (2003), Contexts,
Subtexts, Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (2011),
and Russian Writers on Translation. An Anthology (2013). He is founding
editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the
Bloomsbury book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation.

Geraldine Brodie is a Lecturer in Translation Studies and Theatre Translation at

University College London (UCL). Her research centers on theatre translation
practices in contemporary London, with recent publications in Rereading
Schleiermacher: Translation, Cognition and Culture (2015), Contemporary
Theatre Review (2014) and Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation
(2013). Along with Marie Nadia Karsky, she co-edited the 2016 special issue of
Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance on Martin Crimp, playwright,
translator, translated. Geraldine Brodie initiated and co-convened the UCL
Theatre Translation Forum and devised and co-convenes the UCL Translation
in History Lecture Series. She is a panel Associate of ARTIS (Advancing
Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies) and was co-editor of the
journal New Voices in Translation Studies from 2012 to 2015.

David Gramling is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of

Arizona. With Aniruddha Dutta, he has co-edited a recent special double issue
of Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke University Press) on the question
of “translating transgender.” With Chantelle Warner, he co-edits the peer-
reviewed interdisciplinary journal Critical Multilingualism Studies. He is a
Co-Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Council of the United Kingdom
Large Grant “Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language,
the Body, Law, and the State,” and is a National Endowment of the Arts
Translation Fellow for his work with Aron Aji co-translating the poetry of
Murathan Mungan. An excerpt of the unpublished, embargoed translation
viii Contributors
he has completed with İlker Hepkaner of Sabahattin Ali’s 1943 novel The
Madonna in the Fur Coat has been published in TRANSIT. His monograph The
Invention of Monolingualism will be published with Bloomsbury in October
2016. Recent essays have appeared in German Quarterly, German Studies
Review, Cultural Critique, The American Reader, and Germanic Review. He is
a proud member of the American Literary Translators Association, the German
Studies Association, and the Middle East Studies Association. At Arizona, he
teaches on Turkish–German Studies, multilingualism and translation, LGBT
studies, Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, as well as a diverse slate
of general education classes and advanced German language.

İlker Hepkaner is a PhD candidate of culture and representation at the

Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University.
His dissertation is on the politics of space and heritage in Turkey and Israel.
His other research interests are the politics of translation, intellectual history,
museums, and historiography in Turkey and Israel. He translated Sabahattin
Ali’s novel The Madonna in the Fur Coat (1943) with David Gramling, and
an excerpt from this embargoed, unpublished translation has been published
in TRANSIT.

John Kearns worked extensively as a translator from Polish to English and for
ten years edited the journal Translation Ireland. In 2008 Continuum published
his edited collection, Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods
and Debates. His own poetry has appeared in various publications and he has
recently been anthologized with other Irish experimental poets in a Viersomes
collection (London: Veer Press). He lives in Dublin, where he is training as a
psychotherapist.

Alexandra Lopes is an Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Portugal,

where she teaches Translation History and Theory and Literary Translation,
as well as Theories of Culture. She holds an MA in German Studies and a
PhD in Translation Studies. She is currently a member of two research lines:
Culture, Art, and Citizenship and Translation, Cognition, and Culture. Areas of
interest include literary translation, translation history and theory, and culture
studies. She has published several papers mainly on Translation Studies both
in Portuguese and international volumes, as well as a handful of translations
of texts by authors such as Peter Handke, Herta Müller, William Boyd, and
Salman Rushdie.

Tom Toremans is Assistant Professor at the University of Leuven, where he

teaches English Literature and Literary Theory. He has held postdoctoral and
nominated fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
of the University of Edinburgh (2007/2008) and is a founding member of
the Centre for Reception Studies (CERES, www.receptionstudies.be). He
has published on the Romantic practice and theory of translation (Carlyle,
 Contributors ix
Coleridge, De Quincey), the reception and translation of British literature in
the Low Countries, poststructuralist theorizations of reading and translation
(de Man, Derrida), and contemporary fiction (J.M. Coetzee, Alasdair Gray,
James Kelman, Alan Warner). With Beatrijs Vanacker (University of Leuven),
he is currently preparing the edition of two special issues on the theme of
pseudotranslation (for the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature
and Interférences littéraires). He is also supervisor of a research project
on “Cultural Transfer and Translation in Scottish Romantic Periodicals,
1817–1829” (co-supervisor: Dr. Tom Mole (University of Edinburgh), funded
by the Flemish Research Council, 2016–2020).

Michelle Woods is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New

York, New Paltz. She is the author of Kafka Translated: How Translators Have
Shaped Our Reading of Kafka (2013), Censoring Translation: Censorship,
Theatre and the Politics of Translation (2012), and Translating Milan Kundera
(2006). She is co-editor of the Bloomsbury book series Literatures, Cultures,
Translation. She has written several articles on the translation of Czech and
Irish literature and film. Her translation of Adolf Hoffmeister’s 1929 interview
and translation lesson with James Joyce was published in Granta (2005). She
has also translated work by the young Czech writers Jakuba Katalpa and Mirek
Šindelka, both published in Words Without Borders (2014).
Series editor’s preface

The International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS)

is a worldwide forum designed to enable scholars from different regional and
disciplinary backgrounds to debate issues pertinent to translation and other forms
of intercultural communication.
By bringing together the disciplines of Translation Studies and Intercultural
Studies under one umbrella, the Association facilitates a dialogue that encompasses
but also goes beyond traditional academic boundaries. IATIS is convinced that
the intellectual challenges posed by globalization and multiculturalism can only
be met by a genuinely interdisciplinary approach.
The Association pursues this objective through the organization of a triennial
international conference and regional workshops, the creation of web-based
resources as well as the publication of a Yearbook and the online journal New
Voices in Translation Studies.
The Yearbook, which addresses not only IATIS members but also the international
scholarly community, is a key publication for the Association. Each Yearbook
is devoted to a topical theme and guest edited by an expert in the field. Previous
Yearbooks have covered topics such as Translation Studies in Africa (2009),
Cognitive Explorations of Translation (2010), and Self-Translation (2013). The series
aims to promote and disseminate innovative research, rigorous scholarship and critical
thinking in all areas of Translation Studies and intercultural communication.
The 2015 IATIS Yearbook marks a new departure, for it is the first Yearbook to
be published in conjunction with Routledge. IATIS is delighted to be associated
with a global publisher already well established in the fields relevant to our major
intellectual interests and concerns and we look forward to a fruitful collaboration.
This volume, edited by Michelle Woods, brings together practitioners and
researchers in Literary Translation Studies to explore the concept of authorizing
in all its complexity. The result is a collection of chapters that shed new light on
the many roles of the translator as well as on the nature of translation itself.

Jenny Williams
Chair, IATIS Publications Committee
Dublin City University, Ireland.
Introduction
Michelle Woods

One translates with books.*

*And not only with dictionaries
(Berman 2009, 52)

Who authors translations and who authorizes them? These seemingly simple but
bedeviling questions still motivate research in Literary Translation Studies (LTS),
which, after the descriptive and then the “cultural turn” of the 1990s moved beyond
a text-to-text comparison and began reading translation as a material act as well as
a textual and literary one. The cultural turn in Translation Studies coincided and
overlapped with the rise of postcolonial studies in literature departments and the
(very slow) “worlding” of syllabi in English as well as Comparative Literature
departments: the material considerations of translation reflected the political core
and impact of asymmetrical cultural transfer being studied more generally in lit-
erature departments. Two highly influential Comparative Literature scholars in the
US, Gayatri Spivak and Emily Apter, have, in turn, authorized Translation Studies
as a kind of afterlife to the dying discipline of Comparative Literature, but it is, in
Apter’s words, a “new translation studies” that puts “postcolonial comparatism . . .
and media theory into combustive alignment” as opposed to old school “humanis-
tic translatio studii” (Apter 2005, 204). “The new Comparative Literature,” Spivak
writes, “makes visible the import of the translator’s choice”; thinking about these
translation choices can open up the discourses of power, “the disappeared history
of distinctions in another space,” as she notes, “full of the movement of languages
and peoples still in historical sedimentation at the bottom, waiting for the real vir-
tuality of our imagination” (Spivak 2005, 18).
Comparative and World Literature scholars such as Spivak have influenced
Translation Studies especially in terms of postcolonial and subaltern theories
(Robinson 2004), but have not since engaged at any length with LTS as a field.
Indeed, when they do, they are critical: Apter in particular criticized Translation
Studies for emphasizing translatability in literature, partly because of the presence
of “professional” translators in the field (she singles out David Bellos) who try
to defend the notion of translatability because they want to be published (Apter
2013, 19). Apter’s championing of “untranslatability” allows for a critical and
2 Michelle Woods
resistant approach to thinking about literatures of other languages, but to do so she
mischaracterizes LTS of the last twenty years as being more interested in pursu-
ing Walter Benjamin’s notion of “reine Sprache (pure or transparent language)”
rather than “translation failure” and untranslatability (Apter 2013, 9). She cites
her reading, in a footnote, of critics such as Venuti, Bassnett, Baker, and so on
(Apter 2013, 4), all of whom have expanded, contrary to her arguments, on cul-
tural readings in which the question of untranslatability is integral. The problem is
the translator who has to translate the untranslatable and who assumes, in Apter’s
words, that translation is “a good thing, en soi—under the assumption that it is a
critical praxis enabling communication across languages, cultures, time periods
and disciplines—the right to the Untranslatable was blindsided” (Apter 2013, 8).
Although contemporary LTS has documented and analyzed translation as a critical
praxis across time and cultures, its situation of textual studies within political and
historical contexts, its recovering of alternative literary histories through transla-
tion histories, and its interest in translators’ choices and the power structures that
influenced the choices or how they were read have given a much more complex
and nuanced picture than Apter acknowledges.
Even Spivak has deliberately elided translation as a hermeneutic experience; in
her famous, long, introduction to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology,
Spivak only arrives at the subject of translation after eighty pages and dismisses
translation in a brief deconstructive maneuver, writing that she does not want
“to launch [her] philosophy of translation here. Instead I give you a glimpse of
Derrida’s” (“Translator’s Preface” Derrida 1976, lxxxvii), and then she quotes
him briefly on the notion that all writing is translation. Spivak’s deconstruction
of the notion of a preface and perhaps—though I don’t think it’s intentional—of
a translator’s preface might have been more pertinent in the late 1970s but now
seems uninformative. She does write briefly about some translation choices
related to Mahasweta Devi’s work in her essay “Translating into English,” but
there is no sustained interest in opening up the text hermeneutically via these
¨ø÷Bè Her obliqueness about the translation process comes through in an article
in Public Culture: “Do I have ‘experiences’ as a translator,” she asks in answer
to the question, “Describe some of your own experiences as a translator.” “How
can these questions be answered as they are posed[?]” she asks, as she “provid[es]
philosophically unassailable answers” but realizes that “I never reflect theoreti-
cally” on translation (Spivak 2001, 13).
David Damrosch, a champion of worlding literature, is also surprisingly dis-
missive at times of the knowledge and skills of translators. He exhorts students to
learn other languages because it is “liberating, freeing us from complete depend-
ency on translations and allowing us entry into the many pleasures of a writer’s
style that can only be glimpsed in translation” (Damrosch 2009, 128). The anxiety
about the inability to read style through translation can also be seen in Apter’s
criticism of Bellos once more for suggesting that “style does survive translation”
(Apter 2013, 19, quoting Bellos), arguing that his notion of “maximal translation”
(Apter 2013, 20) speaks of a selling-out, a submission to domestic and market
economy norms. What LTS has consistently analyzed, however, is how and when
 Introduction 3
translators have engaged with aesthetics in complex, nuanced ways displaying
again and again their role as exegetical readers, often dealing with external pres-
sures to normalize texts but not necessarily bowing to them. What happens in that
encounter opens up the texts themselves, and perhaps it is here, that hermeneutic
locus, that the anxiety about the figure of the translator in Comparative Literature
is embedded: an anxiety about critical authority. So what can LTS contribute and
why is it being sidelined in Comparative and World Literature theory? The two
questions are linked in the figure of the translator.
All of the chapters in this volume are interested in the authority of the transla-
tor whether disguised, elided, or decidedly present. I have admired conference
papers and articles by all the contributors to this volume and what links them is an
academic generosity as literary scholars, open to what translators and translation
history can teach them (and us) about reading and hermeneutics. The chapters
represent the interest in LTS in the translator as an author, a figure who creates
and recreates the translated text, but they also point to the more visibly emergent
idea of the translator as an exegetical (and not just linguistic) authority.
As Antoine Berman points out, the idea that “the translator acts like a critic at
all levels” (Berman 2009, 28) is not new (he quotes George Steiner’s assertion
that some translations “are supreme acts of critical exegesis”), but that the fertile
relationship between literary criticism and an acknowledgment of the translator-
as-critic has not been fully realized even though “criticism and translation are struc-
turally related” (Berman 2009, 28). By this he means that criticism and translation
are both “ontologically bound to the [original] work” (Berman 2009, 26) and “living
in and through the works” (Berman 2009, 27). Berman emphasizes that criticism
“is necessary” to literary works “that call for and authorize something like criticism
because they need it. They need criticism to communicate themselves, to manifest
themselves, to accomplish themselves and perpetuate themselves” (Berman 2009,
26, Berman’s italics); for Berman, the modality of criticism is innately tied to the
act of translation. Yet, until only recently, he argues, translation criticism has been a
“morose discourse” of critical judgment that upholds the secondariness of transla-
tions and thus the inevitable “defectivity” in the translation results (Berman 2009,
29). Berman proposes a reading and rereading of the translation as an autonomous
work and a reading of the translation project and translation horizons of the transla-
tor’s work—not in order to judge the quality of the translation but as a means by
which we can interpret the work and what it has become.
Technology helps, certainly in terms of thinking about the translator’s project:
Translation Studies has been a step ahead of Literary Studies in embracing data-
driven and corpora-based readings, thinking as Anthony Pym puts it of “what gets
translated” beyond close comparative readings of the translation and the original
(Pym 2013, 89), but technology has also enabled a genuine paratextual visibility
for literary translators and their projects, including blogs, interviews, and web-
based sites devoted to translated literature. Old media, however, tend to act as if
these resources were unavailable. As Brian Baer incisively shows in Chapter 1,
in which he analyzes the data from three years of translation reviews in The New
York Times, 1900, 1950, and 2000, acknowledgment of the translator is a slowly
4 Michelle Woods
incremental, and still troubled, act. Focusing on the “complex cultural site” of
translation reviews, Baer considers how these reviews might show how translators
and translations are “imagined in a given society at a certain moment in history”
and how they might reflect sociopolitical interests; for instance, in the increase
in the reviews of German literature in 2000 that, Baer suggests, reflects anxiety
about post-Cold War transition, or in the more various reviews of different genres
in 1950, including reviews of translated history and philosophy volumes (greater
than in 2000) that might reflect a wider rethinking of the world, post World War II.
Baer considers whether globalization “marked by digital connectivity and mass
migration” has impacted interest in translations in the mainstream press, but the
data from 2000 does not suggest any wholesale shift (from 1950) in how transla-
tions are reviewed. Should we question, he asks, the progressivist narrative in
Translation Studies, which argues toward the greater visibility of the translator
(and translation in general)?
The New York Times, a paper of record, is one of the very few print venues
for serious book reviews left in the US. It serves a city in which one third of
the denizens are foreign born and where almost half (49 percent) of residents
speak a language other than English at home (20 percent of all Americans—over
60 million people—speak a language other than English at home).1 Interest in
Americans’ other homes and other tongues is barely shown in traditional book
reviews, but is sometimes used to defend insular American tastes in literature; for
instance, The New York Times’s influential reviewer Liesl Schillinger (a translator
herself), protested against the Nobel Committee’s attack on American insularism
by suggesting that American literature contained its own hyphenated identi-
ties that might point to a greater worldiness than that of the prize winner, Herta
Müller, whose “works most people haven’t read” (Schillinger 2009).2 She rightly
points to the kind of hyphenated identities nominated for the US National Book
Award: Colum McCann, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Marcel Theroux, but of course
all of these men are global expatriate writers from a certain class writing in a real-
ist and commercial style. The Romanian-German Müller’s devastating, difficult,
beautiful novels fall into what Schillinger describes as “German and Northern
European contemporary novels [that] zestfully catalogue bleak, pessimistic reali-
ties that strike an American audience as profoundly depressing” (Schillinger
2009). Likewise, she adds, “Middle Eastern fiction at the current moment lacks
a Jane Austen who could win over an American female readership . . . Not every
taste travels” (Schillinger 2009). Taste, as Bourdieu argued, is a form of social and
class control and is, as such, constructed: Schillinger’s assumptions about both
non-US fiction and what a domestic readership is (and what a gendered readership
wants) reflect an assertion of power from the pages of one of the organs that has
defined cultural taste in American life.
The meeting of old and new media, however, opens up new possibilities for
translators and readers alike. The international bestselling Karl Ove Knausgaard
and Elena Ferrante had books included in The New York Times’s “100 Notable
Books of 2015” list. Online, the list helpfully gives hyperlinks to the newspaper’s
review of each book. Neither of the reviewers—two well-known novelists,
 Introduction 5
Jeffrey Eugenides and Rachel Cusk—mentions the translator and their transla-
tion. Yet, a curious reader can find interviews with the translators only a click
away: there are interviews with Knausgaard’s translator, Don Bartlett, online at
The Paris Review or at World Literature Today, and after reading Elena Ferrante
(a notoriously reclusive and invisible author), you can read interviews with Ann
Goldstein at The Atlantic Monthly online or on a literary blog.3 Both translators
speak about the aesthetic style of the novels, My Struggle: Book 4/Min Kamp and
The Story of the Lost Child/Storia della bambina perduta, which seem to appeal,
on the face of it, to the dominant realist and confessional style in the English-
speaking publishing industry. Yet, the translators complicate that notion: whereas
Eugenides suggests that there is something suspicious about Knausgaard’s “pho-
torealism, with its emphasis on hyper-clarity and detail” (Eugenides 2015) that
obfuscates Knausgaard’s artfulness in choosing what he represents (including his
own fraught meeting with Eugenides), Bartlett writes about the deliberate art-
fulness of Knausgaard’s language that creates, in itself, a tension with realism
(Esposito 2015). Martin Aitkin, who translated Knausgaard’s review of another of
the “Notable Books,” Michel Houellebecq’s Submission/Soumission, noted in an
online interview that Knausgaard’s artfulness fits into a cross-Scandinavian cur-
rent that is interested in “the interface between fact and fiction” (Semmel 2015).
On the bright side of The New York Times’s “100 Notable Books”: nine of the
fifty fiction books on the list were translations (18 percent!) and almost half were
written, and translated, by women. They were mainly published by smaller presses,
who have gained a reputation for producing translated work: New Directions,
Archipelago, NYRB Classics, Other Press, Europa, and Coffee House Press, indi-
cating a dynamic publishing shift. The New York Times had well-known US-based
writers review the work, such as Claire Messud and Laila Lalami (although it
should be noted that only three of the nine reviewers were women), suggesting
a certain prestige accorded to the books being reviewed. Yet even Messud and
Lalami in their reviews of Magda Szabo and Kamal Daoud resort to the generic
adjectival dictums: “beautifully retranslated” by Len Dix; “ably translated” by
John Cullen. In a third review, the film critic Terrence Rattigan notes that Clarice
Lispector is “sensitively translated” by Katrina Dodson. Another two of the nine
reviews do not mention the translator or translation (so four of the nine elide the
translator); and only two of the nine reviews spend some time on the question of
translation. Jim Krusoe (an American novelist) expresses his delight at the lit-
eral presence of Valeria Luiselli’s translator, Christine MacSweeney, in Luiselli’s
novel The Story of My Teeth/Historia de mis dientes: MacSweeney “created” one
of the sections of the novel, “a completely wonderful chronology . . . There is
something thrilling about finding a writer generous enough to invite another to
participate in her creation” Krusoe notes (Krusoe 2015).
The other writer who mentions translation is Knausgaard, reviewing
Houellebecq’s Submission/Soumission; he too connects the act of translation with
thinking about the aesthetics of the novel. He remarks on the difference between
the Norwegian and English translations of the first sentence of Submission, which
is “slightly disharmonious and irregular in rhythm, untidy even”; for Knausgaard
6 Michelle Woods
the syntax renders a sense of character, “a human presence, a particular individ-
ual, a rather faltering and yet sincere character” (Knausgaard 2015). However, for
Knausgaard, he intuits this rhythm from the Norwegian translation, “which I sense
is closer to Houellebecq’s original than Lorin Stein’s graceful English translation”
(2015). A month earlier, Lorin Stein (who is also the editor of The Paris Review)
was interviewed online about his Houellebecq translation in which he spoke about
finding an appropriate tone for the style of the novel, something that only occurred
as he got to the end of translating the book and unearthed the right rhythm and
tone “that’s a bit Buster Keaton-ish. It’s a little slow, a little narcotized” (Epstein
2015). The insight into style complicates the mostly literal readings of the novel
as being a misogynistic and racist statement by Houellebecq, with both Stein and
Knausgaard suggesting that the underlying irony (whether it ultimately works
or not) presents a France that, at its most cultivated (in the body of a university
professor), is misogynistic and racist, and caught in a stultified notion of French
culture (the protagonist is a bored expert on Huysmans, a fact that is itself a com-
mentary on the pose of Decadence and Huysman’s retreat into conservatism).
Spivak’s notion that translation can create “another space” for historically
under-represented languages and peoples that is “waiting for the real virtual-
ity of our imagination” (Spivak 2005, 18) may have some hopeful signs in the
virtual world, which allows another space for translators to speak and to speak
back for themselves and the worlds they represent. You can read individual blogs
and blogs about translating Haruki Murakami on the eponymous blog, moder-
ated by Murakami’s Polish and Norwegian translators, Anna Zielinska-Elliott and
Ika Kaminka; look at VIDA counts for women in translation on the “Women in
Translation” tumblr; find databases of Japanese literature in English translation
or read about Czech literature in translation on the CzechLit website; or hear
Alex Zucker, a translator of Czech literature, speak about the economic and
legal practicalities of translation in a podcast on the Three Percent blog.4 What
emerges from this online presence is a lively, complex version of often difficult
and aesthetically ambitious literatures far from the more mainstream portrayal of
a blandly global and commercial literature.
The virtuality of the imagination starts, at some level, with the imagination
of the translator, their reading from the space of one culture to another. What
that might open up, as David Gramling and İlkerHepkaner suggest in Chapter 2,
is more complex than a culture-to-culture, language-to-language transfer that
speaks of asymmetry only at the borders of that transfer. Gramling and Hepkaner
translated a Turkish modernist classic, Sabahattin Ali’s Kürk Mantolu Madonna/
The Madonna in the Fur Coat (1943), a novel written in two Turkishes: a trans-
lingual Ottoman Turkish and a “purified” Turkish implemented in the Kemalist
era. The protagonist, Raif, is a translator negotiating the nationalization of the
language and hiding (making “untranslatable”) his own translingual past, both
in the Ottoman era and during time spent in Weimar Germany. Gramling and
Hepkaner’s nuanced reading of Madonna focuses on translingualism and the dif-
ficulties it places on ideological notions of national literature both in the domestic
sphere (what nations choose to represent as national literature, written in a national
 Introduction 7
language) and in the target culture (what is chosen to represent another national
language and literature). Their translation project is linked to their exegetical
interests (both scholars are focused on migration and transnational identities in
Europe and the Middle East), and they represent a new generation of translators
who are also Translation Studies scholars, challenging mononational and mono-
lingual area studies and earlier divides between academic and literary translation.
In terms of LTS, their work shows the innate connection of the philological with
the ideological; translating the novel reveals the central theme and mode of lan-
guage and identity construction.
Sabahattin Ali, a translator himself, chose a fictionalized translator to explore
translingual identity. Likewise, the English playwright and translator Martin Crimp
explores performative identity and, as Geraldine Brodie argues insightfully, “the
boundaries of invention within translational narratives” through a translator-
figure, Clair, in his 2008 play The City, which was premiered almost simultane-
ously in German and in English. Brodie focuses on Crimp’s interest in translation
as a creative and reflexive act as, through his character Clair, he plays with the
“authorization and destabilization of the creating voice”; the audience is never sure
whether the translation—a book in a paper bag, one of the few physical props in
the script—is Clair’s invention or not, though she claims to be translating a diary
written by an offstage character, a writer, Mohamed, who has been tortured. The
anxiety of place and reality (embodied in some way by the physical, if covered,
diary—the equivalent of Raif’s German journal buried in his desk drawer in
Madonna) is temporarily mitigated by the need for and performative materiality of
interpretation and reinterpretation by the characters, the author(s), and the audience.
If we have fictional translators connected to their author-translator’s herme-
neutic and existential questions, we also have the translator disguise as a palatable
strategy (the paper bag, the desk drawer) of what Pym calls “inculturation” (2013).
Alexandra Lopes considers the work of Mário Domingues, the African-born son of
an Angolan slave and a Portuguese clerk who survived as a hugely prolific trans-
lator and pseudotranslator even under the Salazar dictatorship. Lopes provides a
perspicacious and revealing rereading of Venuti’s notions of fluency and domesti-
cation via Domingues who actively provided domesticated versions of the Western
classics and pseudotranslations of genre novels for a wide Portuguese readership
yet did so, Lopes argues, whilst also destabilizing notions of Portuguese identity.
He provided an ending to Charles Dickens’s unfinished final novel, The Mystery
of Edwin Drood, which, like many English nineteenth-century novels, is hemmed
through with colonial thread, and presented it as the quintessential Englishman’s
novel: Lopes asks whether in engaging with Domingues’s subaltern identity, we
can reread his apparently domesticating work as subversive and, in some ways, an
activist appropriation, a “pseudoauthorship.” In other words, how do we read the
Drood of Dickens-Domingues, and how might it change how we read Dickens?
For Tom Toremans, thinking about translators and pseudotranslation is a way
of reading and getting to the heart of the Romantic era’s interest in the relationship
between imposture and authenticity, as well as in transnational transfer. Initially
focusing on Blackwood’s Magazine’s purportedly translated reviews (and then on
8 Michelle Woods
Thomas Carlyle’s pseudotranslation Sartor Resartus), Toremans argues that the
guise of translation “effects a gesture that is at once ironic and incisively critical,
establish[ing] authority in its very construction of inauthenticity.” Toremans’s
analysis paves an interesting path into analyzing translation reviews, as he con-
siders reviews of fake German books to be “a performative gesture rather than
mere play or mystification” that questions the very authority of the reviewing
process and its epigonism, its reliance on an “original” text about which it speaks;
reviews can be seen “as exemplary vehicles of imposture to the extent that they
are dependent on an original literary text in order to claim critical authority.”
Thinking about translation and pseudotranslation in the Romantic era brings us
back to the modern flowering of individual legal intellectual rights alongside the
valediction of the author (in spiritual and commercial terms) as the unique and
original progenitor of textual authority. What Toremans uncovers are the playful
and subversive engagements with this authority.
The auctoriality of the translator is investigated in John Kearns’s analysis of
Krzysztof Bartnicki’s work; Bartnicki undertook the herculean effort of translat-
ing James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into Polish (published in 2012 as Finneganów
tren; it is only one of seven full translations of the Wake since its publication in
1939). He then produced two works, Da Capo al Finne (2012) and Finnegans _ake
(2014): the first is “the full text of Finnegans Wake minus all the letters of the
alphabet except the first eight” and without any spacing, symbols, and so on,
and it is a rendition of the Wake that can be read as a musical score (excerpts of
which can be heard online on Bartnicki’s Soundcloud page); the second is focused
around “a core set of character types” in the Wake, indicated in Joyce’s text by
sigla, one of the set of keys to the work—Bartnicki’s rendering reveals these in his
auctorial work as both musical keys and semiotic keys. For Kearns, Bartnicki’s
reading-writings of the Wake reveal the active agency of the translator not only
as a reader but as an intimate of the author’s text. Engaging with Anthony Pym’s
2011 figuration of the translator as a non-author, Kearns argues that Pym does not
take into account “the uniqueness of the auctorial involvement of the translator”;
that is, the translator is certainly not the author of the translated text but is an
“active agent in the continuation of the text, an agent that problematizes notions
of authorship” with “the reader ultimately complementing the auctorial gesture.”
The translator is not just a reader (in the Barthesian sense; a reader complement-
ing the auctorial gesture), but rather inhabits a place of intimacy with the work,
an “intimacy shared by author and translator through immersion in the world of a
novel” that positions the translator in a much closer relationship to the author than
the reader. Bartnicki’s audacious and innovative renditions of the Wake engage
with Joyce’s “radical approach” to writing and translation, a dialogue that thinks
about and foregrounds the “keys” to reading and interpretation.

**
“The criticism of a translation,” Berman writes, is “that of a text that itself results
from a work of a critical nature” (Berman 2009, 28). As such, “criticism and
translation are structurally related. Whether he feeds on critical works or not in
 Introduction 9
order to translate such-and-such a foreign book, the translator acts like a critic on
all levels” (Berman 2009, 28). Berman argues that the recognition by the critic
of the translator-critic can result in a certain tension; if “criticism is ontologically
bound to the work” (Berman 2009, 26), then the critic realizes her own work
might be subject to the same questions of secondariness and “defectivity” (Berman
2009, 29) that the translation she considers is. “The translated text,” Berman notes,
“calls for judgment because it gives rise to the question of its own truthfulness
and because it is always (which brings into question this truthfulness) defective
somewhere” (Berman 2009, 29). Her focus on the “morose discourse” of finding
that “defectivity” (Berman 2009, 29) may be connected to a perceived challenge
to hermeneutic authority (who has read the original work correctly).
The recognition between the critic and the translator, though, that reading
a text destabilizes it, questions it, potentially gives a positive value to the very
fear of “defectivity”: mistakes are made but what is the quiddity of these mis-
takes? The temptation has been to judge the linguistic capabilities of the translator
(long-judged the single heart of their talent) for simply getting it wrong (what
the translator Mark Harman calls the “gotcha mentality” (Woods 2013, 85) of
translation reviews and criticism). On closer examination, though, these mistakes
are often an entry into a reading of the text. For instance, Franz Kafka’s first
translator, Milena Jesenská, translated the title of his short story, “Das Urteil”/
“The Judgment” into Czech as “Soud”/“The Court.” Czech critics used this mis-
translation (as they saw it) to suggest that Jesenská’s German was defective, and
yet, analyzing her translation closely, it becomes clear that her choice of title is
deliberate and connected to her reading of the story as a spatial judgment (Woods
2013, 28–9). One might or might not agree with that reading, but the choice chal-
lenges the reader to interpret the story herself.
Sometimes these “mistakes” seem like reasonable judgment, but are chal-
lenged by the author and reveal fascinating micro and macro issues surrounding
the text. For instance, Milan Kundera criticized interpolated “unaccustomed
punctuation” (Kundera 1988, 130), a seemingly pedantic gripe, but then he
wrote at length to his translators, Peter Kussi and Michael Henry Heim, about
the necessity of retaining punctuation to preserve syntactical flow and rhythm. A
quick example: in Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí/The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
two lovers, Sabina and Franz, are given a “Malý slovník nepochopených slov”/
“A Dictionary of Misunderstood Words” (2006, 103; 1985, 89), one of which is
“síla”/“strength” (2006, 123; 1985, 111). In bed Franz shows off his muscles: in
Heim’s translation, “Sabina said, “The muscles you have! They’re unbelievable!”
(Kundera 1985, 111). In Czech, Sabina says, “To je neuvěřitelné, jaké ty máš
svaly” (Kundera 2006, 123): there is no breathiness, no exclamation points, and
only one sentence; in Czech, her comment is utterly melancholic as she knows
Franz is metaphysically weak, disguised in a male idea of physical strength.
The two exclamation points seem radically alien to Sabina’s character, and, as it
turns out, were likely added to the translation by the editor, reflecting a wish to
make the text more acceptable to American syntactical norms, which indicates
a dominantly political (and therefore, commercial, in terms of the Cold War)
10 Michelle Woods
reading of the text (Woods 2006). This became more evident because of archival
work in the editor’s, and in both translators’ archives; yet, even if it had been
the translator’s choice, it would still reveal a rereading of the presentation of
Sabina’s character at a point in the novel where Kundera deliberately underlines
the instability of signification.
Seeing—and training—the literary translator as an expert reader and according
a critical respect to her/him potentially enriches critical practice, allowing a self-
reflexivity in reading and a certain humility in being open to our own mistakes
and too ready judgments. As literary scholars, the real advantage of being in LTS
is that we are constantly forced to think philologically: language and meaning are
inevitably destabilized and the question of aesthetics is almost always profoundly
tied into macrotextual and material concerns (the exclamation point leads both
to a consideration of Kundera’s authorial style, what he does with syntax, and
to the question of cultural asymmetry, both between the West and its internal
“East,” and between the editor and the translator). Primarily, though, the encoun-
ter with the translator-exegete (in and beyond the text) allows an encounter with
the pulse of the text—what language does in the text—that makes works of lit-
erature noteworthy. Feeling that pulse, following the translator’s doubts, battles,
and moments of grace, should challenge us to read and reread these entries, these
little earthquakes, into particular textual universes. Great works of literature offer,
of course, a kind of disruption of this world: understanding the rules—aesthetic
and epistemological—of these incipient universes changes how we think and
how we see, what Kundera (writing about Kafka) called “une marche sous le ciel
de l’étrangeté” (1988, 63). It makes the process of reading and translating—and
reading translations—somewhat organic and moveable, constantly indefinable, a
practice full of doubts—and possibilities.

Notes
1 http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/census/nny2013/nny_2013.pdf
http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acs-22.pdf
2 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/weekinreview/18schillinger.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/books/review/jeffrey-eugenides-reviews-my-
struggle-by-karl-ove-knausgaard.html
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/28/translating-knausgaard-an-
interview-with-don-bartlett/
http://sfwp.com/translators-cut-martin-aitken-denmark/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/books/review/the-story-of-my-teeth-by-
valeria-luiselli.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/books/review/michel-houellebecqs-submission.
html
http://www.vulture.com/2015/10/lorin-stein-translating-submission.html
3 http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/28/translating-knausgaard-an-interview-
with-don-bartlett/)
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/translating-norways-love-literature
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/the-story-of-a-new-
language-elena-ferrantes-american-translator/403459/)
https://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/meet-the-translator-ann-goldstein/
 Introduction 11
4 http://tazakitsukuru.blogspot.com
http://womenintranslation.tumblr.com
http://www.japaneseliteratureinenglish.com
http://www.czechlit.cz
https://rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=13512

References
Apter, Emily. “Afterlife of a Discipline.” Comparative Literature 57.3 (2005): 201–6.
––––. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. New York: Verso,
2013. Print.
Berman, Antoine. Toward a Translation Criticism: John Donne. Trans. and ed. Françoise
Massardier-Kenney. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009. Print.
Damrosch, David. How to Read World Literature. Malden, MA, Oxford and Chichester:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1976. Print.
Epstein, Ian. “Lorin Stein on Translating France’s Most Dangerous Author.” New York
Magazine 7 Oct 2015. Web. 16 Jan 2016.
Esposito, Scott. “Translating Knausgaard: An Interview with Don Bartlett.” The Paris
Review 28 Apr 2015. Web. 16 Jan 2016.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. “Norwegian Woods.” Rev. of My Struggle: Book 4, by Karl Ove
Knausgaard, trans. Don Bartlett. The New York Times 23 Apr 2015: BR 1. Print.
Knausgaard, Karl Ove. “On the Brink.” Rev. of Submission, by Michel Houellebecq, trans.
Lorin Stein. The New York Times 8 Nov 2015: BR 1. Print.
Krusoe, Jim. “Choppers.” Rev. of The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli, trans.
Christina MacSweeney. The New York Times 13 Sep 2015: BR 11. Print.
Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. London:
Faber and Faber, 1985. Print.
––––. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Grove, 1988. Print.
––––. Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí. Brno: Atlantis, 2006. Print.
Pym, Anthony. “Inculturation as Elephant: On Translation and the Spread of Literary
Modernity.” Perspectives on Literature and Translation. Creation, Circulation,
Reception. Eds. Brian Nelson and Brigid Maher. New York and London: Routledge,
2013. 87–104. Print.
Robinson, Douglas. Translation and Empire. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2004. Print.
Schillinger, Liesl. “Words Without Borders.” The New York Times 18 Oct 2009: WK 1.
Print.
Semmel, Kyle E. “Translator’s Cut: Martin Aitkin.” Santa Fe’s Writers Project 31 Mar
2015. Web. 16 Jan 2016.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Questioned on Translation: Adrift.” Public Culture 13:1
(2001): 13–22. Print.
––––. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Print.
Woods, Michelle. Translating Milan Kundera. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2006.
Print.
––––. Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka. New York:
Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.
1 Translation criticism in newspaper
reviews
The rise of readability
Brian James Baer

Book reviews in newspapers are complex cultural sites, providing a window

onto the current interests and concerns of a society—or, at least, of its edu-
cated elite—as manifested in what gets published, what gets reviewed, and how
a work is reviewed. At the same time, book reviews are one of the relatively
few places where academics can address a popular audience—a good number
of book reviews in newspapers are written by university professors for the com-
mon reader. In the case of translated works, book reviews represent one of the
even fewer sites where lay readers are exposed to discussion of translation and
the translator’s task. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to presume that reviews of
translated books appearing in newspapers can tell us something about the ways
in which translation and translators are imagined in a given society at a certain
moment in history, raising a number of interesting questions. For example, has
the rise of Translation Studies as a discipline over the last thirty years affected
in any way the treatment of translation and translators in such popular venues, or
is the translator’s invisibility a concern only in the ivory tower of academe? Has
globalization, marked by digital connectivity and mass migration, influenced the
popular understanding of translation as manifested in these newspaper reviews,
not to mention the source languages of the books under review? And, in a deeper
sense, what can this popular discourse about translation tell us about a society’s
relationship to the foreign?
That being said, book reviews are also a highly problematic data set. The pic-
ture they provide of reading preferences and practices is partial, at best, given
that the vast majority of reviews appearing in newspapers are of books published
by major trade publishers, and so were selected for their broad marketability, as
well as their translatability—as the selling of translation rights is an important
profit source for the large Anglophone publishing companies. And so while the
book review may play an integral part in the workings of the book market, its
role is circumscribed, and by no means autonomous. As Brian Lennon notes, “the
composition, publication, and dissemination of literature, and the composition,
publication, and dissemination of literary criticism itself find themselves nontrivi-
ally enmeshed, in a kind of print-cultural codependence” (Lennon 2010, 3).
The ambiguity of the reviewer’s role—as promoter or critic, disseminator or
gatekeeper—is one of the reasons the book review as a genre has itself been an
 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews 13
object of criticism—if not disdain—since its inception. As Gail Pool notes, “For
two centuries reviews have been lambasted by critics, often reviewers them-
selves, who have complained that reviews are profligate in their praise, hostile
in their criticism, cravenly noncommittal, biased, inaccurate, illiterate, or dull”
(Pool 2007, 2). Similar complaints can be heard in the field of Translation Studies
regarding criticism of translated works. As Katharina Reiss writes, “A careful
study of the potential and limitations of translation criticism is all the more neces-
sary because the present state of the art is inadequate. The standards most often
observed by critics are generally arbitrary, so that their pronouncements do not
reflect a solid appreciation of the translation process” (Reiss 2000, xi). Moreover,
Reiss points out, many reviews in German make no mention of the work’s status
as a translation, contributing to the translator’s invisibility and mystifying the
status of translated works as interpretations of the original.
In order to provide a more empirical basis for a critique of translation criti-
cism, I decided to conduct a corpus-based study of reviews of translated works
that appeared in one of the leading US newspapers, The New York Times, at
three points in time: 1900, 1950, and 2000. Although it is impossible to isolate
trends with any reliability in such a sample, of three years separated by fifty-year
intervals, I felt that such a manageable sample might allow me to develop a meth-
odology that could be used for larger ones in the future, and that the results might
contribute to the formulation of hypotheses regarding the development of transla-
tion criticism over the course of the twentieth century. (Even with this relatively
small sample, the data collection was quite laborious.) I chose these three years
to reflect certain moments of US history—1900, representing a period of relative
isolation before the country’s entry into World War I; 1950, representing a period
of rapid engagement with the world following the Allied victory in World War II;
and 2000, representing a period of globalization, characterized by technologiza-
tion and mass migration.
I located all reviews of translated works published in The New York Times
during these years by searching in the newspaper’s historical database under the
key terms “translated by,” which was the paper’s formulaic way of indicating a
work as a translation (as opposed to, say, “translation by”). Selecting the genre
“Review” proved to be unreliable, as it for some reason eliminated a number of
book reviews of translated works. Therefore, I searched under “translated by”
alone, and then went through every result, eliminating any false hits and down-
loading the actual book reviews.

What books get reviewed and who reviews them?

The difference in the number of reviews of translated works was rather signifi-
cant, especially between 1900 and 1950. In 1900, a total of nineteen translated
works were reviewed; in 1950, forty-nine; and in 2000, sixty-seven. In terms of
the source languages of the translated works, there were also some significant dif-
ferences, as well as a few surprising similarities, especially in terms of the ranking
of the source languages (see Table 1.1). The first number in Table 1.1 represents
14 Brian James Baer
Table 1.1 Languages of the source texts

1900 1950 2000

Ancient languages (compilation) 0 2 0

Arabic 0 1 [7] 0
Chinese 2 [2] 1 [7] 3 [7]
Croatian 0 0 1 [9]
Czech 0 0 1 [9]
Dutch 2 [2] 0 4 [6]
Finnish 0 1 [7] 0
French 7 [1] 17 [1] 11 [2]
German 2 [2] 8 [2] 14 [1]
Greek (Ancient) 0 0 1 [9]
Greek (Modern) 0 1 [7] 0
Hebrew 0 0 3 [7]
Hungarian 1 [3] 0 1 [9]
Italian 1 [3] 6 [3] 8 [3]
Latin 1 [3] 0 0
Japanese 0 2 [6] 0
Norwegian 0 1 [7] 0
Persian (Farsi) 1 [3] 0 0
Polish 1 [3] 0 1 [9]
Portuguese 0 1 [7] 3 [7]
Russian 0 5 [4] 7 [4]
Spanish 1 [3] 3 [5] 6 [5]
Vietnamese 0 0 1 [9]
Yiddish 0 0 2 [8]
Total # of languages 10 13 16

the total number of English translations from that language, and the number in
square brackets is the ranking of that language for that year.
While such a sampling cannot establish trends or causation, a few gener-
alizations can be made. First, all three years reflect the dominance of Western
European languages (French, German, Italian, and Spanish), especially French,
which ranks well ahead of all the other languages both in 1900 and 1950, and sec-
ond in the 2000 corpus. The stable presence of French and Italian works at the top
of the rankings suggests that a country’s political and economic relevance to the
US is not a determining factor in what books get reviewed. The fact that Spanish
is ranked fifth in 1950 and 2000—and not at all in 1900—also supports this claim,
given the fact that Spanish is the language of the largest non-English speaking
minority in the US, but is not at the very top of the rankings. The idea that the
selection of works for translation, and of translations for review, may not be con-
nected to current political and economic realities supports Pascale Casanova’s
contention regarding the relative autonomy of the book market. Russian, how-
ever, may be the exception that proves the rule as no Russian texts were reviewed
in 1900, when Russia had little political or economic relevance to the US, while
in the 1950 and 2000 corpora, periods of increasingly tense relations, Russian
ranked fourth, above Spanish (see Table 1.2).
 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews 15
Table 1.2 Domains represented by the translated texts reviewed

1900 1950 2000

Architecture 0 0 1
Art History 3 2 0
Biography 0 1 2
Children’s Literature 0 0 2
History 2 8 2
Literature 9 17 49
Memoir 0 10 5
Other 0 1 0
Performing Arts 0 2 0
Philosophy 0 2 2
Political Science 1 1 2
Psychology 0 1 0
Religion 0 3 0
Science 1 0 3
Social Studies 1 0 0
Travel/exploration 2 1 0
Total # of domains 7 12 9

The differences across the domains of the translated works under review
are quite striking (see Table 1.2). Although literature is ranked first in all three
years, in 2000 it is over nine times more popular than the next most popular
domain, in this case, memoir. In 1950, on the other hand, we see far greater
diversity in the domains of the translated texts under review. Whereas seventeen
reviews deal with literary works, ten texts are memoirs and eight are histori-
cal studies. If we group memoir and history together as being related to the
historical past, however, then they would assume the first ranking, suggesting
a keen interest in understanding the past through the lens of history or histori-
cal reflection following World War II. Works on philosophy and religion were
also more popular in the 1950 corpus than in the other two, reflecting, too,
perhaps, the profound rethinking of values initiated by World War II and the
Holocaust. On the other hand, what the rise of literature in the 2000 corpus
means is hard to say. Reviews of children’s literature appear only in the corpus
for 2000.
Before discussing the criticism itself, let me say a few words about the
reviewers in the three corpora under investigation. Of the eighteen reviews in
1900, sixteen are anonymous. Of the two reviewers named, one is a civil engi-
neer and the other a writer, poet, and lecturer. Both are male. In 1950, the name
of the reviewer is provided, usually accompanied by a short description of the
reviewer’s credentials. In 1950, only one of the forty-nine reviewers is female.
In terms of occupation, fourteen reviews were written by university professors
or instructors, who most probably knew the source text language and so could
compare the source and target texts. Three were written by Harry Levin, a pro-
fessor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, and two were written by Henri
Peyre, a professor of French at Yale University. The other reviewers were
16 Brian James Baer
published authors, journal or newspaper editors, or journalists. Several in the
latter group were described as foreign correspondents, suggesting that they, too,
had some acquaintance with the language of the source text. Only a small num-
ber of reviewers in the 1950 corpus were professional book critics, although they
tended to author multiple reviews in the course of the year. In the 2000 corpus,
on the other hand, only eight of the sixty-five reviewers were college professors
or instructors. (Note: the number of reviewers, sixty-five, does not align with
the total number of books reviewed, sixty-seven, as the corpus contains one
review that covers three books.) The number of authors among the reviewers
increased in this corpus in tandem, perhaps, with the greater number of reviews
of literary works. This is significant insofar as the university professors and
structors who author reviews are typically specialists in the language and cul -
ture of the source texts, while the authors are often not and are invited to write
reviews based on their literary achievements, not their linguistic knowledge. In
terms of gender parity, surprisingly, we see only a slight improvement in the
2000 corpus, with fourteen of sixty-four reviews being authored by women.
For a full breakdown by gender of the source text authors, translators, and
reviewers, see Table 1.3.
Striking is the gender disparity among the authors of the source texts selected
for review, the translators of those source texts, and, especially, the review-
ers. The positive shifts toward greater gender parity, are very slight among the
authors and the translators, with women in the former group moving from 12 percent
to 14 percent of the total number of authors in the 1950 and 2000 corpora,
respectively, and in the latter group, from 37 percent in the 1950 corpus to 39
percent in the 2000 one. The shift among reviewers was more significant—from
5 percent to 22 percent—but the starting point was very low; there was only one
female reviewer in the 1950 corpus. Interestingly, only twice in the entire 2000
corpus did a female reviewer review a translation by a female translator of a
work by a female author. Both works, one could say, reflect traditional stereo-
types regarding women’s literary tastes: Evelyne Lever’s biography of Marie
Antoinette, The Last Queen of France, translated by Catherine Temerson and
reviewed by Amanda Foreman, and Margriet de Moor’s novel Virtuoso, “about
a love affair between a Neopolitan woman and a castrato,” translated by Ina
Rilke and reviewed by Julie Gray (Gray 2000).

Table 1.3 Breakdown by gender of source text authors, translators, and reviewers

1900 1950 2000

Author (male) 18 45 59
Author (female) 1 4 10
Translator (male) 13 38 45
Translator (female) 6 14 29
Reviewer (male) 1 named 48 53
Reviewer (female) 0 named 1 15
 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews 17
Translated literature as “good to think”
Before examining the nature of the translation criticism in the three corpora, I
would like to pause for a moment to consider the forces shaping what works get
translated and subsequently reviewed by focusing on one of the more notable
shifts in the 2000 corpus: the rise of German as the most popular source language
of the books reviewed. At first glance, the popularity of German in the 2000 cor-
pus would appear to support the notion of the autonomy of the literary realm
from the political or economic, for there are no obvious material explanations. A
closer examination of the books reviewed, however, suggests that while Germany
did not represent a political or economic threat in 2000, it was, to quote Claude
Lévi-Strauss, “good to think” (1964)—specifically in regard to the so-called
“transition” period following the fall of communism. Initially hailed (in the
Anglophone West) as the triumph of capitalist democracy and, in Francis
Fukuyama’s now famous formulation, “the end of history” (1992), the fall of
communism was seen by many as inaugurating the progressive incorporation of
the rest of the world—first, East Germany, then Eastern Europe, and finally the
East en gros, by way of the Middle East—into the Western political/economic
model of development. The “transition,” however, did not go as anticipated.
Neoliberal capitalism could not deliver on its promise of broad economic pros-
perity, and weak democratic institutions were no match for rising sectarianism,
and so by the late nineties authoritarian regimes had returned in several Eastern
European countries, most notably Russia, complicating the progressivist narra-
tive of the inevitable spread of capitalist democracy and human rights throughout
the world. The history of Germany, at the center of both world wars and then
divided between communism and capitalism, serves in many of the reviews as a
microcosm for all of modern European history.
In his review of Krishna Winston’s translation of Günther Grass’s novel Too
Far Afield, for example, James J. Sheehan describes the novel as dealing “with
the German questions—that painful intrusion of the past into the present that
remains a part of Germans’ national consciousness” (Sheehan 2000, BR20). Later,
Grass describes the unification as an Anschluss, implicitly casting the West in
the role of the Nazis. “Firmly opposed to the merger of the two German states,”
Sheehan writes, “[Grass] has been sharply critical of what he regards as the new
Germany’s materialism, corruption and xenophobia.” And in this, the reviewer
declares, Grass “has it right” (Sheehan 2000, BR20). In the review of Brigitte
Goldstein’s translation of Monica Maron’s Animal Triste, a collection of stories
set in post-unified Berlin, Noah Isenberg describes the collection as expressing
“anxieties about the end of history,” critically referencing Fukuyama’s concept
(Isenberg 2000, BR20). One of the stories recounts “an ultimately tragic love
affair” between an East and a West German, offering another ambivalent reading
of the reunification (Isenberg 2000, BR20). Moreover, the title of the review, “The
Bug Man,” is an obvious reference to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” an archetypal
tale from Eastern Europe about a transition gone horribly wrong. In the review
of John Brownjohn’s translation of Peter Schneider’s Eduard’s Homecoming,
18 Brian James Baer
which is set in East Berlin, Michael Gorra writes, “Between them, the war and
the wall have dominated European history of the century now ending.” And
later: “Impermanence is now itself the city’s permanent condition,” implying that
reunification has not brought peace and stability but frenetic change (Gorra 2000,
BR6). Another collection of short stories, Simple Stories, by Ingo Schultze and
translated by John L. Woods, is also set in East Germany during the “final post-
wall days of the Communist regime,” which the reviewer, Richard Eder, describes
as “a society of shadows” (Eder 2000, E9). The face portrayed in these stories,
writes Eder, is that of “anyone of many among the millions who lived in the
compressions of the old German Democratic Republic and now struggle with the
decompression bends” (Eder 2000, E9). The theme of the stories, the reviewer
goes on to say, is “the mark left by the cold war and its aftermath upon a divided
Germany” (Eder 2000, E9).
While only four of the German works reviewed in 2000 are set in East
Germany, and only five deal specifically with Germany’s past, almost all are
read by the reviewers through the lens of German—and often specifically East
German—history. The specter of Germany’s violent history and of the trou-
bled transition casts a very long shadow in 2000. For example, James Miller,
in his review of Howard Etland and Kevin McLaughlin’s translation of Walter
Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which has nothing to do with German history,
recounts the historical circumstances of the writing of the work, which was left
unfinished when Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 while trying to escape the
Nazis. Miller goes on to draw a direct parallel between Benjamin’s project and
the “predicament” of post-communist Europe: “[In this work] might be found
clues for facing up to the predicaments of present-day Europe, where fascism
and Communism were pitted in a battle to the death against liberalism, and also
against each other” (Miller 2000, BR22). And in a review of another work that
ostensibly has nothing to do with East Germany, insofar as East Germany did
not yet exist—Victor Klemperer’s diary from 1942 to 1945, entitled I Will Bear
Witness, translated by Martin Chalmers—Max Frankel draws a direct connec-
tion to the GDR: “Neither the diary nor the editors’ commentary in this prepares
us for the professor’s decision to spend the last 15 of his 78 years as an honored
teacher and Communist party functionary in East Germany” (Frankel 2000,
BR12). Similarly, in his review of Michael Hoffman’s translation of a collec-
tion of Joseph Roth’s short stories, written in the entre-deux-guerres period and
published under the title The Wandering Jews, Richard Eder writes, “The course
history actually took haunts Roth’s fiction both as past and, by the 1930s, as
prologue, and the theme of this fantastical and fundamentally writer verges on a
lament for those lost negatives” (Eder 24 December 2000, BR7).
The theme of troubled transition also appears in reviews of Germanophone
fictional works that do not overtly treat the region’s history. For example, two
reviews appeared in The New York Times in 2000 of the novel Crazy, written by
Benjamin Lebert, a teenager at the time of the novel’s publication, about a trou-
bled teen who has partial paralysis on the left side of his body. The review that
appeared in the Book Review was written by critically-acclaimed novelist Jeffrey
 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews 19
Eugenides, who describes the novel’s theme as “the perils of being a German
teenager” (Eugenides 2000, BR12). And in a review of Austrian writer Peter
Handke’s On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, translated by Krishna Winston,
Kai Maristed, offers an ambivalent image of transition: “[Handke’s novel] sug-
gests a Dantesque purgatory, a painful battle for the soul’s survival” (Maristed
2000, BR15).
Interestingly, while Handke’s book does not touch on the post-communist
transition per se, three years later Maristed, the reviewer, would publish a novel,
Broken Ground (2003), that is set in East and West Berlin from the 1950s to the
1990s and deals with the traumatic aftermath of the fall of communism. And in
that same year, the playwright Doug Wright would debut his play I Am My Own
Wife, about the East German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, whose Stasi
file complicated Wright’s initial plan to present her as a “gay hero.” The play
would win the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony for Best New Play in 2004, testify-
ing to the continued investment of the Anglophone world in communism and its
aftermath.
I should point here out that similarly ambivalent readings of the fall of com-
munism in Eastern Europe are evident in the 2000 reviews of Russian works, most
notably, the final volume of Boris Yeltsyn’s autobiography, Midnight Diaries,
Irina Ratushinskaya’s Fiction and Lies, and Andrei Makïne’s Confessions of a
Fallen Standard-Bearer.

Translation criticism in the 1900 corpus

In analyzing the criticism that appears in the reviews in the three corpora, I
will make a number of distinctions. First, among the texts that do not mention
the translator, I distinguish between those that ignore the translator and those
that erase the translator. The former reviews make no mention of the transla-
tor while the latter not only fail to mention the translator but discuss the style
of the translated text as if it were that of the source text author. Among the
reviews that mention the translator, I distinguish between those that mention
her by name, and those that refer to her only with the generic term “transla-
tor.” I also distinguish between those reviews that mention the translator and
those that also provide some assessment of the translator’s work, be it a single
word or phrase, and those that do not provide any evaluation of the transla-
tion. Important, too, in evaluating translation criticism is the placement of the
critique—is it located at the very end of the review, as a kind of afterthought or
perfunctory mention, or in the body of the text. In some cases—albeit rare—the
status of the text as a translation is foregrounded, and may appear at the very
beginning of the review.
In the corpus of reviews from 1900, seven out of the eighteen reviews—
39 percent—mention the translator or the fact that the text is a translation; eleven
do not. Of those that do not mention the translator, eight ignore her altogether,
while three erase her, conflating the translator’s style with that of the source text
author, as evident in the following examples:
20 Brian James Baer
The volume is readable in every page.
(Anon, 6 Oct 1900, BR1)

The style is light but never frivolous.

(Anon, 30 Jun 1900, BR12)

as a writer of peculiarly direct yet graphic French he is also to be praised.

(Anon, 18 Aug 1900, BR12)

All seven of the reviews that mention the translator, or the fact that the text
is a translation, offer some evaluative criticism of the translation. Five of the
seven reviews mention the translator by name. Moreover, the criticism pro-
vided in all seven of the reviews is quite positive, as evident in the following
examples:

Mr. Marchant’s translation of the volume is remarkably good, and it is

no easy task to render into English the peculiar quality of M. Bourget’s
French.
(Anon, 10 Nov 1900, 767)

Throughout its four hundred pages the translator, Ruth Putnam, has proved
herself fully equal to accomplishing alone the labor which in the previous
volume she divided with Oscar Bierstadt. In style and clarity of expression
the translation is admirable.
(Anon, 17 Feb 1900, 107)

The translation is remarkably sound, without a touch of pedantry, and the

‘Baron’s Son’ can be commended as one of the best novels of the year.
(Anon, 16 Jun 1900, BR2)

In regard to the last translation cited above, the reviewer also notes that the trans-
lator was right to alter the title and abridge the work. The most laudatory criticism
appears in the reviews of two volumes for which the translator also served as the
editor. In one such case, the translator/editor is referred to as the “author” of the
volume (Croes 1900, BR1).
The one reviewer who ventures a somewhat negative critique does so rather
gently and only after complimenting the translator:

Mr. Frank Sewall, who has rendered these poems in their present form, from
the original French, says that he has retained his verse form, but purposefully
discarded rhyme in order to present better their exact substance. So far as one
can see, he has done his work more than ordinarily well, though a few lines
might have been more felicitous and rhythmical with certain slight permuta-
tions that the text itself suggests.
(Benton 1900, BR42; italics added)
 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews 21
This is also one of only two reviews for that year that is not anonymous. The
reviewer, Joel Benton, was a noted writer, poet, and lecturer of his time.
Overall, the tone of the reviews that discuss translation quality in the 1900 corpus
can be described as polite, suggesting that the anonymity of the reviewers did not
encourage more negative comments. The adjective “readable” is used only once in
the reviews. The preference for other adjectives, such as “sound,” “admirable,” and
“remarkably good,” alongside descriptions of translation as a “task,” “labor,” and
“work” present translation not as a linguistic matching game but as a challenging
enterprise, involving re-creating the source author’s style, not simply rendering the
text readable, as evident in the comment: “it is no easy task to render into English the
peculiar quality of M. Bourget’s French” (Anon, 10 Nov 1900, 767). The implication
here being that this peculiar quality was indeed captured in the English translation.

Translation criticism in the 1950 corpus

In the corpus of reviews for 1950, the nature of the translation criticism is signifi-
cantly different from that of the 1900 corpus in terms both of quantity and quality:
thirty-three out of the forty-nine reviews, or 67 percent, mention the translator or the
fact that the work is translated; twenty-three out of those forty-nine reviews, or 47
percent, provide some evaluation or criticism of the translation. So, unlike in the 1900
corpus where every mention of the translator, or of the fact that the text is a transla-
tion, was accompanied by some evaluative criticism, nine reviews in the 1950 corpus
indicate nothing more than that the text is a translation. The percentage of reviews that
not only mention that the text is a translation but that also provide some evaluation of
the translation is, however, significantly higher in the 1950 corpus (47 percent) than in
the 1900 one (39 percent). Of the nine reviews that do not indicate that the text under
review is a translation, seven ignore the translator, while two erase her.
Fourteen of the twenty-three reviews that offer an evaluation of the translation
(29 percent of the total number of reviews) contain only brief, one or two word
evaluations of the translation. Moreover, most of these words are positive, though
not very specific: excellent(ly) (7x), adequate(ly) (3x), well (2x), ably (2x), and
skillful (1x). A few of the reviewers use more nuanced terms, such as interestingly
(1x), highly satisfactory (1x), and sonorously (1x), or, in the words of the reviewer
Edward Dahlberg: “It is a sensitive little book, translated into plain nourishing
words by Angus Davidson” (Dahlberg 1950, BR3). Although the exact criteria
for evaluating these translations in such positive terms are unclear, it is interest-
ing that the descriptor “readable” is totally absent from the corpus. Moreover, the
adjective “interestingly” suggests a criterion somewhat different from readable.
Furthermore, in his review Dahlberg recognizes that the “plain nourishing” words
of the translation he is reviewing belong to the translator!
Of the nine reviews that offer more than a cursory mention of the translation
and/or the translator (18 percent of the total number of reviews), six were written
by college professors who were experts in the language of the source text. Among
the rest, one was written by the poet W. H. Auden, and another by Joseph A.
Barry, then head of the Paris bureau of The New York Times. It is likely both men
22 Brian James Baer
knew the source languages of the translated texts they reviewed, suggesting a cor-
relation between the nature of the criticism and knowledge of the source language.
Moreover, this lengthier criticism is often difficult to categorize simply in terms of
positive or negative. Auden, for example, critiques the translations but nonethe-
less recognizes the enormous contribution made by translators:

While it is obvious that Miss Dalven has tried to make her translation as scru-
pulously accurate as possible, her ear for the rhythms of the English language
is defective . . . we should be very grateful to Miss Dalven for introducing
to us a world of poetry which has been closed to us. Every translator is an
international agent of good-will.
(Auden 1950, 183)

Harry Levin, a professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard, also expresses

gratitude toward the translator: “we now must be doubly grateful to the translator
and the publisher” (Levin 28 May 1950, 142). In another review, Levin notes the
translator Samuel Putnam’s “services to international letters”:

The role of the translator, ordinarily so underpaid and unappreciated, seldom

attracts the literary craftsman who is well qualified both as linguist and stylist.
Such an exceptional figure was Samuel Putnam, whose services to interna-
tional letters culminated a year ago in his fine translation of “Don Quixote.”
(Levin 22 Oct 1950, BR3)

This idea of translation as service is a unique feature of the 1950 corpus, leading
some reviewers to note the importance of the translated work, despite the “flaws”
in the translation:

Often, the freshness and ingenuity of Russia’s oral literature, and especially the
musical value of its rhythms, is lost in the translation; nevertheless, the American
reader will get some idea here of the scope, themes and poetic power of Russia’s
folklore. . . . His is a pioneering work in English, and an excellent one.
(Slonim 1950, BR3)

Though written in an oversimplified language, and only adequately trans-

lated, the book makes its bitter message quite clear.
(Plant 1950, BR3)

Three of the reviewers use their reviews to comment more generally on the
translator’s task, specifically critiquing a literalist approach:

The text, which in the original Italian is difficult but clear, does not read equally
well in English. The translator’s very devotion to his task may be to blame; too
much deference leads to literalness, and literalness breeds obscurity.
(Milano 1950, 175)
 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews 23
Translation of poetry is, strictly speaking, impossible because it involves
separating two elements, the form and the words, which in poetry are insepa-
rable. It is only in cases so rare as to be miraculous that a translator hits upon
the form in the new language which is a true analogy of the original form;
usually either an identical form is adopted and the language distorted in con-
sequence, or a literal word by word and line by line translation is made and
the form in consequence not distorted but destroyed.
(Auden 1950, 183)

Among those who offer more extensive criticism, Harry Gilroy, a Sunday staff
reporter for The New York Times, presents an interesting image of the translator
as co-creator:

Between the author and his excellent translator, the lively thoughts and the
living words have been provided to turn a madcap stunt into a venture of the
human spirit.
(Gilroy 1950, 104)

Overall, the reviews in the 1950 corpus speak to the new position of the US on the
global stage following World War II, as reflected in an expansion of the source
languages and domains of the books reviewed—the dominance of history and
memoir is especially salient—and in the emergence of the notion of translation as
service to society, underscoring the importance of cross-cultural communication
and understanding in the post-war world. As Auden put it: “Every translator is an
international agent of good-will” (Auden 1950, 183). Also evident in the corpus
is an appreciation for linguistic expertise, as reflected in the large percentage of
reviews written by university professors and foreign correspondents who knew
the source language of the book they were reviewing.

Translation criticism in the 2000 corpus

A number of shifts are evident in the 2000 corpus of translation reviews both in
terms of the quantity and the quality of the reviews, as well as the profiles of the
reviewers. Fifty-three out of sixty-five, or 82 percent, mention either the translator
or the fact that the work is a translation. (Forty-nine of those fifty-three reviews
mention the translator by name.) Of the fifty-three reviews, forty-four contain
some element of translation criticism—that is, 68 percent of the total number of
reviews. Of the nine that do not, eight ignore the translator; only one erases her:
“The personal style of the book makes it more readable than a balanced survey
‹uld hope to be” (Ridley 2000, BR14).
Of the forty-four reviews that contain an element of translation criticism, four-
teen contain more extensive critical analysis of the translation and the translator,
while thirty contain only one or two word descriptors. Interestingly, not only
is the percentage of reviews containing one or two word evaluations signifi-
cantly higher in the 2000 corpus than in the 1950 corpus (29 percent in 1950;
24 Brian James Baer
46 percent in 2000), but the descriptors used change in significant ways. For exam-
ple, the most popular descriptor in the 1950 corpus, excellent, does not appear
once in the 2000 corpus. The variety of descriptors also changes, increasing sig-
nificantly in the 2000 corpus, with no one descriptor being used more than three
times: ably (3x), accurate (1x), admirable/ly (2x), artful(ly) (1x), audacious (1x),
deft(ly) (2x), devoted (translator) (1), elegant(ly) (2x), exquisite (1), easily-flow-
ing (1x), faithfully (3x), fast-paced (1), fine (1x), fluent (3x), gifted (translator)
(1x), graceful(ly) (1x), impressive (1x), lively (1x), lucid (1x), remarkable (1x),
seamless (1x), skillfully/with skill (2x), stiffish (1x), supple (1x), reads well (1x).
Despite the plethora of adjectives, however, the nature of the analysis remains
rather narrow, with many of the descriptors focusing on the readability of the
translation (elegant, easily-flowing, fluent, graceful, lucid, seamless, supple, reads
well, etc.) and the faithfulness (faithful, devoted) of the translation, which are far
less prominent in the earlier corpora. The promotion of readability as a central
evaluative criterion is also achieved in the 2000 corpus through the condemnation
of “awkwardness” (2x).
It should be noted, however, that readability is not always seen in positive
terms. Michael Gorra, for example, in his review of John Brownjohn’s transla-
tion from the German, expresses ambivalence over the translation’s readability,
associating it with loss of source text features: “John Brownjohn’s translation
has flattened out the deadpan edge of Schneider’s German, giving the novel a
less strongly voiced, less original style. However, it reads smoothly, its narrative
marked by a practiced, fluent ease” (Gorra 2000, BR6). Such an interpretation of
readability, however, was the exception. In the vast majority of reviews, readabil-
ity was presented as an unqualified positive attribute.
The percentage of reviews containing more extensive translation criticism in
the 2000 corpus shows a less dramatic increase from 1950 (18 percent in 1950 and
22 percent in 2000). That being said, the reviews containing more extensive criti-
cal analysis in the 2000 corpus tend to be longer than those in the 1950 corpus, so
that the overall number of words dedicated to translation criticism is significantly
greater than the simple number of reviews might imply. Moreover, four of the
fourteen reviews containing extended criticism in the 2000 corpus were written
by college professors. Most of the others were written by authors, and only two
by journalists.
The promotion of readability is evident in the longer examples of translation
criticism, too, where it takes the form of an attack on so-called literalist approaches
to translation—something that was only perceptible in the 1950s corpus becomes
a full-fledged assault in the 2000 one. The critique of literalness is rendered most
forcefully by the author and translator Daniel Mendelsohn: “And indeed, the flaws
as well as the virtues of his new rendering may be said to stem from a profound
reverence for the original. In Merwin’s translation you can lose the forest for the
trees [due to its] ostensible literalness” (Mendelsohn 2000, BR8).
Similar in tone is Columbia professor of Comparative Literature Edward
Said’s critique of a collected volume of translations of essays and lectures by
Michel Foucault:
 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews 25
This volume is the latest addition to the list of Foucault’s posthumous writ-
ings to appear in average (and in some cases somewhat below average)
English translation. . . . At other times, a lamentably literal translation . . .
delivers approximate meanings that may be funny but aren’t very helpful. . . .
Some of these difficulties have to do with editors, translators and a publisher
who out of a worthy respect for Foucault’s memory and achievement prob-
ably thought that they should leave the great man’s words as they were, even
when they were delivered hastily or far too allusively.
(Said 2000, BR16)

Mark Anderson makes a similar comment in his critique of Pierre Joris’s transla-
tions of Celan:

Joris—who is not, incidentally, a native speaker of English—strives for a lan-

guage that retains the strangeness of the German original. At its best his trans-
lation captures the movement of Celan’s voice with its peculiar line breaks,
dislocated syntax and compound words. But German tolerates neologisms
and composite words better than English, and so these translations often seem
needlessly awkward, at time undigested.
(Anderson 2000, BR11)

The author Alberto Manguel makes the same point regarding Linda Coverdale’s
translation of a novel by the Caribbean writer Patrick Chamoiseau:

Ultimately, there are two choices when faced with such a prospect: to try
to rewrite the original with some measure of equivalent originality or to try
to pair each term, usage, sentence structure and movement with one chosen
from the English thesaurus. Coverdale has favored the second tactic, and I
am not sure it works.
(Manguel 2000, BR31)

For these reviewers, all of whom are fluent in the source languages of the texts
they are reviewing, excessive fidelity to the source text and to the source text
author produces bad translations.
In addition to the promotion of readability, the 2000 corpus is characterized
by a more negative tone in the reviews. This tone of (millennial?) pessimism
sharply distinguishes the 2000 corpus from both the 1900 corpus, with its polite
appreciation of the translator’s task, and the 1950 corpus, with its recognition of
the translator’s service to the world. The reviews in the 2000 corpus also tend to
be more detailed, some providing specific examples of translator errors or infelici-
ties, as does the novelist Michael Pye in his review of J. C. Patrick’s translation of
Antonio Tabucchi’s The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiri: “The translation
by J.C. Patrick has its awkwardnesses (‘Perfidy’ is much more general in Italian;
‘time recoils’ doesn’t mean much in English, and when someone gets ‘raked from
stem to stern,’ the only weapon involved is the human eye)” (Pye 2000, BR21).
26 Brian James Baer
Pervading several of the reviews containing more extensive translation criti-
cism is a mood of pessimism regarding the very possibility of translation, a sense
that it is an essentially unwinnable struggle, which was not evident in the other
two corpora. Consider, for example, the following meditations:

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” Robert Frost once said, without explain-
ing why it is that certain great poets get translated over and over again. With its
fragmented words, multilingual puns and recondite allusions, the verse of Paul
Celan—arguably the greatest European post in the postwar period—hovers on
the edge of untranslatability. And yet, despite an Everest of difficulties, transla-
tors have repeatedly felt compelled to bring Celan’s dark laments into English,
especially his hauntingly melodic “Deathfugue,” with its searing evocation of
Jewish prisoners forced by the Nazis to play music at their own executions.
(Anderson 2000, BR11)

Pity the poor translator of “Ferdydurke” by Witold Gombrowicz. This irre-

ducibly, brilliantly original novel, first published in Polish in 1937, presents
its would-be linguistic mediator with a style that is unabashedly idiolectic
and irregular even in its native tongue. . . . [The translation] while hardly
perfect—how could it be?—is faithful to the substance of the original.
(Hoffman 2000, BR17)

Unfortunately, a language as rich and original as that of Chamoiseau must be

the despair of any translator.
(Manguel 2000, BR31)

It takes more than a translator to translate the big, long-worked-at novel that
secured this year’s Novel Prize for the Chinese writer Gao Xingjian.
(Eder 18 Dec 2000, BR1)

Lebert’s prose, deftly translated by the overmatched Carol Brown Janeway.

(Eugenides 2000, BR12)

Barbara Harshav struggles heroically with the impossible task of wrestling

Agnon into English.
(Rosen 2000, BR28)

The specter of untranslatability, that is, of translation as an essentially “impossible

task,” is also evident when Jonathan Rosen goes on to describe the troubled his-
tory of the Jewish people as an act of translation:

In some sense, translation isn’t just a problem facing the reader of Agnon, it’s
a problem facing his characters as well. How, after 2,000 years of wandering
around Europe, in the course of which Jews became the People of the Book,
could they translate themselves back into the land of Israel?
(Rosen 2000, BR28; italics added)
 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews 27
A sense of the limits of translatability is also present in the examples that follow:

Dekkers himself may not translate to our culture as well as his prose.
(Teresi 2000, BR25)

The reader must translate as well, feeling for equivalents through the stiffish
(though no doubt accurate) English of Mabel Lee, in order to sense the drift
of a writer who both suggests and withdraws his suggestions.
(Eder, 18 Dec 2000, BR1)

These examples reflect a general tendency in the longer reviews in the 2000 cor-
pus to be negative. The flip side of Harry Gilmore’s praise of the translator as
a co-creator in the 1950 corpus is Rand Richards Cooper’s 2000 critique of the
translator as equally responsible for a failed text: “Again and again Drakulić (or
her translator, Marko Ivic) fails to reach past the most familiar phrase, the most
standard image” (Cooper 2000, BR15; italics added).
Only one reviewer in the 2000 corpus, Richard Eder, notes the important role
of the translator in establishing an author’s international reputation: “Michael
Hoffman writes, in a preface that wonderfully mends the tatters . . . Hoffman,
whose remarkable translations of Roth have helped resurrect this writer in Britain
and the United States” (Eder 24 Dec 2000, BR7).

Conclusion
Brian Lennon refers to the era just before the events of 9/11 as an “apparently
complacent” one for Anglophone publishers, “flourishing in an Anglophone gap,
as it were, between the vanishing of the old Russian-speaking adversary and the
emergence of a new, Arabic-speaking one—a gap defined by the euphoric rhetoric
of global political, economic, and cultural interconnection” (Lennon 2010, 3).
While the triumph of readability as the major evaluative criterion in translation
assessment in the 2000 corpus would appear to confirm this complacence—
everything can, and should, be subjected to standardization through Anglicization,
that is, made readable in English translation, the discourse of untranslatability that
exists side by side in the corpus with the promotion of readability, however, not to
mention the preoccupation with East Germany’s failed transition, puts the empha-
sis squarely on apparently.
By promoting readability, on the one hand, and untranslatability, on the other,
the reviews in the 2000 corpus could be said to play out what Lennon calls the
collision “of the effacement of language, in the teaching ideal of exhaustive
and universal translatability, with the national language reality, so to speak, of
the university (in the United States, at least)” (Lennon 2010, 5). Indeed, only
several years later, the national language reality of the university would pro-
duce a defense of untranslatability as an ethical stance against the Anglophone
hegemony of the international book industry (Apter 2013) and as an alternative
to the foreignization or literalist approaches promoted most notably by Vladimir
Nabokov, Lawrence Venuti, and Anthony Appiah. This new impasse between the
28 Brian James Baer
promotion of universal translatability by the international book industry, and the
promotion of untranslatability by national language departments was, one could
argue, foreshadowed in the reviews that appeared already in the complacent era
of the Anglophone gap.
The results of this corpora analysis also caution us, I think, against fram-
ing Translation Studies within a Western progressivist, essentially civil rights,
narrative that sees the translator in the post-war era as acquiring ever greater
visibility, autonomy, and agency. For while it is tempting to see the increasing
number of reviews that mention the translator by name and that offer both lim-
ited and more extensive evaluation of translations as proof of greater visibility
for translations and translators, the criterion of “readability” appears strongly
embedded in the discourse, as evidenced in the praise of seamless translations
and in the condemnation of literalness. If, as Lawrence Venuti argues in The
Translator’s Invisibility, readability represents a mechanism of Western cultural
hegemony—that is, the domestication of foreign works to the aesthetic standards
of the Anglophone West, which simultaneously achieves the universalization
of those standards—then this study would suggest that this mechanism is even
more firmly entrenched than before, countered only by what some might see as
a defeatist position, that of untranslatability. Moreover, the fact that the Western
European languages remain by far the most common source languages of the texts
reviewed, and that the range of source languages reviewed is only slightly greater
in 2000 than in 1950, suggests either that globalization has had little effect on the
translation and review of foreign literature in the US Anglophone press and/or
that the aesthetic realm of the international book market remains dominated by
Western genres and modes. Furthermore, one can observe a significant narrow-
ing from 1950 to 2000 in the range of genres translated, with the overwhelming
focus in the 2000 corpus on literary works that, one can imagine, closely align
with Anglophone norms—or are made to align with those norms in the process of
producing readable translations.

References

Primary sources

1900 corpus
Anon. “Blok’s History of the Dutch.” Rev. of The History of the People of the Netherlands,
by Petrus J. Blok, trans. Ruth Putnam. New York Times 17 Feb 1900: 107. Web. 19 Dec
2015.
––––. “Books about China.” Rev. of Chin-chin or the Chinaman at Home, by Tcheng
Ki-Tong, trans. R. H. Sherard. New York Times 30 Jun 1900: BR12. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
––––. “Books of Travel.” Rev. of The Ascent of Mount St. Elias, by Luigi Amedeo Di Salvoa,
trans. Linda Villari, and Karl Fricker’s Antarctic Regions, trans. A. Sonnenschein. New
York Times 6 Oct 1900: BR1. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
––––. “A Hungarian Novel.” Rev. of The Baron’s Sons, by Marus Jokai, trans. Percy Favor
Bicknell. New York Times 16 Jun 1900: BR2. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews 29
––––. “Mlle. Smith, Medium.” Rev. of From India to the Planet Mars, by Théodore
Flournoy, trans. Daniel B. Vermilye. New York Times 18 Aug 1900: BR12. Web. 19
Dec 2015.
––––. “Paul Bourget’s ‘Domestic Dramas’.” Rev. of Domestic Dramas, by Paul Bourget,
trans. William Marchant. New York Times 10 Nov 1900: 767. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Benton, Joel. “New Book of Verse.” Rev. of The Trophies, by José Maria de Heredia, trans.
Frank Sewall. New York Times 8 Dec 1900: BR42. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Croes, J. James R. “Old Rome’s Water Supply.” Rev. of Two Books on the Water Supply
of Ancient Rome, by Sextus Julius Frontinas, trans. Clemens Herschel. New York Times
7 Jul 1900: BR1. Web. 19 Dec 2015.

1950 corpus
Auden, W. H. “Of Poetry in Troubled Greece.” Rev. of Modern Greek Poetry, ed. and
trans. Rae Dalven. New York Times 2 Apr 1950: 183. Web. 11 Nov 2015.
Dahlberg, Edward. “Arms and the Peasants.” Rev. of The Works of God and Other Stories,
by Giuseppe Berto, trans. Angus Davidson. New York Times 16 Apr 1950: BR3. Web.
11 Nov 2015.
Gilroy, Harry. “Six Who Dared to Live a Legend. Rev. of Kon-tiki, by Thor Heyerdahl,
trans. F. H. Lyon. New York Times 3 Sep 1950: 104. Web. 11 Nov 2015.
Levin, Harry. “Fragment of a Great Confession.” Rev. of The Green Huntsman, by
Stendhal, trans. Louise Varese. New York Times 28 May 1950: 142. Web. 11 Nov
2015.
Levin, Harry. “Cervantes’ Other Masterpiece.” Rev. of Three Exemplary Novels, by Miguel
de Cervantes Saavedra, trans. Samuel Putnam. New York Times 22 Oct 1950: BR3.
Web. 11 Nov 2015.
Milano, Paolo. “Hope in an Age of Gloom.” Rev. of Of Fear and Freedom, by Carlo Levi,
trans. Adolphe Gurevitch. New York Times 22 Jan 1950: 175. Web. 11 Nov 2015.
Plant, Richard. “Battles without End.” Rev. of Beyond Defeat, by Hans Werner Richter,
trans. Robert Kee. New York Times 23 Jul 1950: BR3. Web. 11 Nov 2015.
Slonim, Marc. “ . . . Including Tales of Lenin.” Rev. of Russian Folklore, by Yuri Sokolov,
trans. Catherine Ruth Smith. New York Times 2 Jul 1950: BR3. Web. 11 Nov 2015.

2000 corpus
Anderson, Mark M. “A Poet at War with His Language.” Rev. of Threadsuns, by Paul
Celan, trans. Pierre Joris; Selected Poems and Prose by Paul Celan, trans. John
Felstiner; and Glottal Stop, by Paul Celan, trans. Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh.
New York Times 31 Dec 2000: BR11. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Cooper, Rand Richards. “The Prisoner.” Rev. of S. A Novel about the Balkans, by Slavenka
Drakulić, trans. Marko Ivic. New York Times 2 Apr 2000: BR15. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Eder, Richard. “Faces Glimpsed in a Society of Shifting Shadows.” Rev. of Simple Stories,
by Ingo Schultze, trans. John L. Woods. New York Times 19 Jan 2000: E9. Web.
19 Dec 2015.
Eder, Richard. “A Dreamlike Chinese Journey Haunted by Past and Present.” Rev. of Soul
Mountain, by Gao Xingjian, trans. Mabel Lee. New York Times 18 Dec 2000: BR1.
Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Eder, Richard. “Unsafe Haven.” Rev. of The Wandering Jews, by Joseph Roth, trans.
Michael Hoffman. New York Times 24 Dec 2000: BR7. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
30 Brian James Baer
Eugenides, Jeffrey. “Pup Fiction.” Rev. of Crazy, by Benjamin Lebert, trans. Carol Brown
Janeway. New York Times 14 May 2000: BR12. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Foreman, Amanda. “Enfant Terrible.” Rev. of The Last Queen of France, by Evelyne
Lever, trans. Catherine Temerson. New York Times 16 Jul 2000: BR10.
Frankel, Max. “Life of Fear.” Rev. of I Will Bear Witness, by Victor Klemperer, trans.
Martin Chalmers. New York Times 2 Apr 2000: BR12. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Gorra, Michael. “Berlin Story.” Rev. of Eduard’s Homecoming, by Peter Schneider, trans.
John Brownjohn. New York Times 13 Aug 2000: BR6. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Gray, Julie. “The Soprano.” Rev. of Virtuoso, by Margriet de Moor, trans. Ina Rilke. New
York Times 12 Mar 2000: BR15. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Hoffman, Eva. “Stream of Subconsciousness.” Rev. of Ferdydurke, by Witold Gombrowicz,
trans. Danuta Borchardt. New York Times 10 Dec 2000: BR17. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Isenberg, Noah. “The Bug Man.” Rev. of Animal Triste, by Monica Maron, trans. Brigitte
Goldstein. New York Times 19 Mar 2000: BR20. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Manguel, Alberto. “King of the Wheelbarrow.” Rev. of Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows,
by Patrick Chamoiseau, trans. Linda Coverdale. New York Times 16 Jan 2000: BR31.
Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Maristed, Kai. “Designated Driver.” Rev. of On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, by
Peter Handke, trans. Krishna Winston. New York Times 17 Dec 2000: BR15. Web.
19 Dec 2015.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Working Their Way to the Top.” Rev. of Purgatorio, by Dante
Alighieri, trans. W. S. Merwin. New York Times 23 Jul 2000: BR8. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Miller, James. “The Start of Something Big.” Rev. of Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin,
trans. Howard Etland and Kevin McLaughlin. New York Times 20 Feb 2000: BR22.
Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Pye, Michael. Rev. of Prince of the Clouds, by Gianni Riotti, trans. Stephen Sartarelli. New
York Times 21 May 2000: BR21. Web. 19 Dec 2015.Ridley, Mark. “How Far from the
Tree?” Rev. of Genes, Peoples, and Languages, by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, trans.
Mark Seielstad. New York Times 20 Sep 2000: BR14. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Rosen, Jonathan. “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Rev. of Only Yesterday, by S. Y. Agnon,
trans. Barbara Harshav. New York Times 24 Sep 2000: BR28. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Said, Edward. “Deconstructing the System.” Rev. of Essential Works of Foucault,
1954–1984, by Michel Foucault, trans. James D. Faubian. New York Times 17 Dec
2000: BR16. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Sheehan, James J. “The German Question.” Rev. of Too far afield, by Günther Grass, trans.
Krishna Winston. New York Times 5 Nov 2000: BR20. Web. 19 Dec 2015.
Teresi, Dick. “Rotting? Stinking? Perfect!” Rev. of The Romance of Ruins, by Midas
Dekkers, trans. Sherry Marx-Macdonald. New York Times 22 Oct 2000: BR25. Web.
19 Dec 2015.

Secondary sources
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature. On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and
New York: Verso, 2013. Print.
Cassin, Barbara. Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles.
Paris: Le Seuil/Le Robert, 2004. Print.
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Penguin, 1992.
 Translation criticism in newspaper reviews 31
Lennon, Brian. In Babel’s Shadow. Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States.
Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Print.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Trans. Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.
Print.
Pool, Gail. Faint Praise. The Plight of Book Reviewing in America. Columbia, Missouri:
University of Missouri Press, 2007. Print.
Reiss, Katharina. Translation Criticism—The Potentials and Limitations. Trans. Erroll F.
Rhodes. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2000. Print.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisiblity. A History of Translation. London and New
York: Routledge, 1995. Print.
2 Translating the translingual novel
in early Turkish Republican
literature
The case of Sabahattin Ali
David Gramling and İlker Hepkaner

We translated Sabahattin Ali’s novel The Madonna in the Fur Coat (1943) in
2011–13, after much encouragement and interest from colleagues had con-
vinced us this project was long overdue.1 Over the previous decade, scholars
of German–Turkish literature—eager to look beyond the “German national
archive,” and thus also historically prior to West Germany’s first guest worker
recruitment agreement with the Republic of Turkey in 1961—had been seek-
ing new ways to share the work of writers, philosophers, and filmmakers on
the German–Turkish axis whose Turkish-language works had remained untrans-
lated and uncommented among German critics (Dickinson 2015, Göktürk 2014,
Cheesman 2007, Mani 2007, Konuk 2010, Seyhan 2008, Gramling 2014).
Despite the boom in Turkish–German studies throughout the 1990s, writers on
the Turkish side of that linguistic relation—like Aras Ören, Güney Dal, Bilge
Karasu, and indeed Sabahattin Ali—have hovered beyond the disciplinary frame
of German Studies, while migrants and postmigrants writing in German are
fêted as the epitome of that field: whether as exemplars of cultural integration
for center-right-leaning critics or of cosmopolitan complexity for center-left-
leaning critics. Against this complex literary-historical backdrop, fraught with
literary monolingualism and selective multiculturalism, Madonna’s frame nar-
rator’s opening remarks resonate in an extraordinarily contemporary way: “It
is of course easier to find a hero who will jump down a well with a dragon at
the bottom than to find someone who’ll dare to climb into a well when we have
no idea what’s down there. In my case, it was thanks to luck alone that I got to
know Sir Raif a little” (Ali 2013, 1).

Precarious authorship
One of the early Republic of Turkey’s literary luminaries, Sabahattin Ali (1907–48)
faced a radically different set of sociopolitical and linguistic constraints than did
Turkish writers migrating to Germany in the latter half of the twentieth century.
While latter twentieth-century novelists like Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Feridun
Zaimoglu learned their literary language of German in the course of transnational
migration, Sabahattin Ali underwent a different process of linguistic assimila-
tion altogether—one from the late Ottoman of his childhood into the engineered
 Translating the translingual novel 33
“pure Turkish” of the 1930s and 1940s (Parla 2008, Lewis 2002, Dickinson 2015,
Albachtan 2013). By the time The Madonna in The Fur Coat was published in
the early 1940s, the Republican state had implemented a comprehensive linguistic
conversion from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet, from Arabo-Persian syntactic
conventions to neological “pure Turkish” replacements, and from a translingual
lexicon typical of empire to a controlled monolingual vocabulary expected of
strong centralized nation-states (Cronin 2013, 38).
For literary authors of the time, the pressure to assimilate linguistically to
“pure Turkish” was not a mere suggestion. Accessing resources, posts, favor, and
freedom from censorship often depended on how one’s literary production cor-
responded with the ongoing disputations over dinner at Mustafa Kemal’s Çankaya
mansion about the future of the Turkish language. Having spent his entire short
adulthood under the Republic’s one-party system, Sabahattin Ali’s status as a
government translator, social realist, and public intellectual came under sporadic,
unpredictable, and repressive scrutiny. Several prison terms for regime-critical
writings culminated in destitution, and ultimately in his assassination while
attempting to escape into Bulgaria in 1948 at age forty-one. Despite his precari-
ous status vis-à-vis the young Republican state, he was still able to make his
livelihood on a government salary as a German teacher and translator for the
state’s Translation Bureau, at one point abandoning government work to attempt
an independent living by driving goods lorries and publishing his own journal.
Along with his short stories and poetry, Ali’s first two novels Yusuf from Kuyucak
(1937) and The Devil Within Us (1940) brought him lasting renown as a major
Turkish literary exemplar of the early Republican period.
Turkish studies scholarship on Sabahattin Ali—almost exclusively circulated
in Turkish language—has been carried out generally in a New Critical method
that foregoes inquiry into the translational, translingual, transnational, and inter-
textual concerns constitutive of the Madonna novel. Like the Turkish national
historiography of this period 1920–45, literary treatments of the 1930s–40s tend
to overlook or obscure the transnational aspects of Republican society, state-
craft, and indeed nation building itself. Ali’s own troubled transnationalism and
translingualism—as immanent in the Madonna text—invites researchers to inves-
tigate these conceptual categories anew, through an early-twentieth-century author
always in an uneasy relationship between the young state that simultaneously
financed and persecuted his literary career, and the West and Central European
constitutive outside of that state, which nourished his aesthetic ambitions and
served as the general model for the Jacobinist cultural revolution to which the
Republicans aspired.
The Madonna in the Fur Coat, serialized in 1940–1 and published in book
form in 1943 during a period of controversy regarding his previous, domestic-
realist novel The Devil Within Us, did not fit easily into Ali’s presumptive profile
as a social realist. Nor did Madonna endeavor to animate any of the national(ist)
narratives expected of Ali at the time. In contrast to his previous work, the novel
bears a liminal and apparently indifferent relationship to Turkish politics, though
Dickinson (2013) claims this is only a surface-level subterfuge, allowing Ali
34 David Gramling and İlker Hepkaner
to stage political questions in a far-away setting beyond the reach of the censor.
Madonna’s awkward stance toward the urgent contemporary topics of Ali’s
domestic moment, twenty years into the Kemalist state, is accentuated nonethe-
less within the text itself—through the novel’s metalinguistic stances on language
use and translation—though this stance failed to be recognized as a critique amid
the meager (nationalist) reception of the novel in the 1950s and beyond. Madonna
was dismissed by many Marxists at the time (among them Nazim Hikmet) for
betraying the social-realist genre, and Ali’s publisher refused payment on the basis
that the novel lacked quality altogether. Beloved as a story of romantic wanderlust
but dismissed as unpolitical, Madonna has thus generally fallen on deaf ears in
scholarship, the translating industry, and in Turkish affairs of state, which—in the
1950s and 1960s—were nonetheless deeply invested in propagating certain kinds
of pro-Western and national-tutelary literature amongst its domestic populations,
both in the form of translated classics and in Turkish-language literature.

Translating chronodiversity
Given the novel’s awkward political positionality, it is fitting that Sabahattin Ali
opens his Madonna with the challenge to descend a dark well, quoted at the outset
of this chapter—a challenge addressed, apparently, to readers, travellers, acquisi-
tions editors, theorists of World Literature, and indeed working literary translators.
In this opening rumination, The Madonna in the Fur Coat’s unnamed frame nar-
rator wonders aloud to his readers how easy it would have been for him to avoid
befriending the novel’s unassuming, uncharismatic, downtrodden hero: an under-
paid translator from German to Turkish. Browbeaten by his bosses, teased by his
co-workers, his derisive nickname “Sir Raif” marks him as a relic of the Ottoman
past and its dubious vainglory. Around the office, there were vague rumors that Raif
had indeed spent some years in Germany long ago. But given how, according to the
narrator, “[Sir Raif] had nothing in common with those types who seemed to shout
‘We speak European!’ with all their being” (Ali 2013, 6), his travels beyond Turkey
garner little curiosity or regard amid the daily grind of the clerk culture around
him. Steeped in Ankara’s early Republican compulsory optimism, which prized an
amalgam of pragmatic business common sense, a specific form of Western-oriented
affluence, and a normative bureaucratic ethos suspicious of wayward behaviors like
poetry and literary translation, the novel’s narrator nearly gives in to the crowd
of bank employee peers, who insist that the German translator Sir Raif probably
“doesn’t even know the language” (Ali 2013, 5). And yet, admits the narrator:

his translations were as accurate as they were beautiful. He could just as

easily translate a letter about the quality of ash and fir timber arriving from
the Yugoslavian port of Susak as one about the operational protocols of a
transverse drill mount and its auxiliary components. The company president
could always send business affiliates the specifications or contracts he had
translated from Turkish to German with the utmost confidence.
(Ali 2013, 6)
 Translating the translingual novel 35
The frame narrator’s praise here is doubly meaningful, because translation into
Turkish in this era was no straightforward conceptual or practical affair. The
very notion of translation vacillated in this era of early Republican literary state-
craft far more widely, for instance, than it does in today’s debates in Translation
Studies. Inherited from Ottoman traditions and discourses around translating,
the practice Sir Raif was construed to be undertaking in the course of his work
could be located among any combination of the following late Ottoman ideals of
“translating”: mealen (sense for sense), sadik (word-for-word, faithful), harfi-
yyen terceme (letter by letter), terceme i-ayniyye (interpreting for sameness),
terceme ve tahrir (translation and rewriting), mütalaa ve istira (examining and
purchasing), or muhavere ve cevap (dialogue and response) (Demircioglu 2009,
143–8). As such, translating in the early Republican era was always in some
way taking an implicit position on new normative nationalist discourses and
their relationship to Ottoman forebears’ procedures, which had in their heyday
been reformist as well in their own way. Both in theory and in practice, transla-
tion was often conceived foremost as a creative endeavor in the cultural politics
of what we might call hyper-domestication. Nurullah Ataç, one of the authors
active in the Turkish Language Institute (TDK) and Translation Bureau, wrote
for instance in 1941 about his translation of Paul Valéry’s Mauvaises Pensées
et autres that:

I keep searching for a softer form in Turkish while trying to figure out what
the writer would say if he were a Turk . . . What we really expect to see in a
translation is the proof that Turkish is capable of expressing things thought in
other languages, without distorting or changing them.
(Ataç, quoted in Askoy 2010, 447–8)

Ataç’s goal was thus decidedly not to give Turkish readers access to Valéry’s
French, but to give Valéry’s subjects a new life as Anatolian, Republican Turks.
This is a step beyond Venuti’s “domestication” heuristic, in that it not only
seeks to render a foreign text accessible to cislingual readers, but to give the
foreign text the kind of cognitive, symbolic, and aesthetic orientation necessary
to proceed as if its narrative world had been Anatolian to begin with. Aytürk
further shows how the Turkish Language Institute at the time was not so much
a pro-Western concern as one with “a built-in tendency to denounce western
scholarship on philology and linguistics as biased and condescending” (Aytürk
2004, 15).
The composition of the Madonna novel thus took place immediately amid
the furor of the first years of the Translation Bureau, during which all manner
of programmatic and ideological ruminations were afoot regarding the nature of
translating and its relationship to nationhood. It wasn’t until 1944, the year after
Madonna debuted in book format, that the Ministry of Education published a
pamphlet of regulations to standardize the Bureau’s activities around translation.
The Minister of Education heading up the endeavor, Hasan Ali Yücel, described
its mission in these terms:
36 David Gramling and İlker Hepkaner
Republican Turkey which aspires to and is determined to become a dis-
tinguished member of Western culture and thinking is obliged to trans-
late into its own language the works of the old and new thinking of the
modern world and thus to strengthen its own existence with their percep-
tion and thought. This obligation invites us to start a full-scale translation
project.
(Yücel 1939, 125)

Among many other leading literary figures of the time, Sabahattin Ali helped
the Bureau shape the list of works from Western humanistic culture that were to
be translated as part of Yücel’s Dünya Edebiyatından Tercümeler/Translations
from World Literature series (Albachtan 141, Aksoy 2010).2 The Commission
aimed to have these works translated within five years, by marshaling and
overseeing a cohort of volunteer translators from various languages. The mem-
bers of the Turkish Language Institute who also participated in the work of the
Translation Bureau after 1940 published collectively a total of 1247 volumes of
translated Western literature, strongly focused on the European Enlightenment
(Aksoy 2010).
This haze of optimism and urgency around translating for particular domes-
tic culture-political purposes, of course, obscured the discrete methodological
predicaments that individual translators would face, privately, in the course of
their own labor. A faculty member at Ankara University, Azra Erhat remem-
bered her difficulties translating German into Turkish in the course of her
work as assistant to such German exile luminaries as Erwin Rohde and Leo
Spitzer. Despite having studied at philologically rigorous schools in Vienna
and Brussels, Erhat reported:

I did not have any problems in understanding the notes in German that Rohde
gave me; my only problem was translating them into Turkish. Don’t forget
that Turkish in 1936 and the following years was far from the colloquial
Turkish we speak today. There was no proper Turkish dictionary available,
and my knowledge of both the old and the new language was so limited that
it in no way sufficed to translate Rohde’s lectures.
(Erhat 2002, 165)

Accounts like this help to indicate the chiastic, dynamic, complex relationship
at the time between German–Turkish translating and Ottoman to Turkish lin-
guistic reform. Swept up in the current of acute and politicized language change,
many exiled German scholars often themselves became partisans of the reform
efforts too. Exiled German professors like Fritz Arndt, for instance, took part
in the retrofitting of Turkish scientific terminology—in the case of words like
solvent, solution, valence, and atomic weight. Emergent language learners them-
selves, these newcomers with considerable symbolic capital often sided with
the Republican purifiers over those who would uphold Ottoman terms for such
phenomena (Albachtan 2013, 140).
 Translating the translingual novel 37
Answerability and the self-effacing translator
Among all this ideologically inflected and frantic activity around translation, pre-
cisely in the two years during which Sabahattin Ali was writing his Madonna
novel, it is unsurprising that he chose to invoke and humanize through the novel
the translator’s invisibility in general, and to do so through a German–Turkish
business translator in particular. A protagonist like Sir Raif, who showed no
interest whatsoever in positioning himself politically amid the programmatic and
nationalist jockeying, was likely to go unnoticed in any Republican institution—
belletristic, financial, or otherwise. And yet his late Ottoman habitus, his rumored
travels to Germany, and his private aesthetic ambitions combine to confound the
presentist demands of his social context, of which he is a negative reflection.
The frame narrator of Madonna confirms Raif’s complex symbolic unreadability,
against the backdrop of the Ankara bank office:

I was already convinced this man was on the whole tedious and irrelevant:
he sat there so stiffly that I began to wonder whether he was alive or dead
at the table across from me—translating this or that, reading that “novel in
German” hidden in his drawer. I’d always presumed a person couldn’t help
expressing himself if something was going on inside him.
(Ali 2013, 6)

Himself an embodiment of the banal untranslatable, the quotidian opaque—a

dark well “when we have no idea what’s down there”—Sir Raif and the novel
he animates pose a riddle, a problem, a gamble, resonant with this special issue’s
theme of authorizing translation. Is the frame narrator going to acknowledge,
and therefore authorize, the full range of Raif’s translingual and transnational
meaning-making experience, even if doing so will put him (and the ever-
controversial novelist Ali himself) at dangerous cross-purposes with the socio-
political imperatives of his early Republican nation-building ethos? Or will his
normative surroundings—monolingual bureaucratic Ankara in the early post-
imperial years of the one-party system—lead the storyteller to retreat into the
sanctioned national and patriotic concerns of his day, leaving the opaque, profit-
less, and muted translator Raif to his own devices? Such questions are incumbent
not only upon the novel’s narrator and its author (who would be assassinated only
five years after Madonna’s publication), but indeed also upon us as its translators,
now seven decades hence. Will we translators of Madonna—eager as we are to
share the story with readers who do not know Turkish—flatten the chronodiversity
of the Turkish language in the novel, assimilating it to an imagined monolingualism
that simply did not exist at the time of its publication?
Indeed, translation as authoriality, as an ethical form of giving an account
of oneself, stands as a central philosophical and humanistic concern of what
would be Ali’s last novel. In Madonna’s opening paragraph, the frame narrator
poses many of the same broad questions about authoriality that animate the early
interventions of his northerly contemporary, Mikhail Bakhtin, in the short essay
38 David Gramling and İlker Hepkaner
“Art and Answerability” (1990 [1919]). In Madonna, the narrator (and we trans-
lators) are hailed into an ethics of multilingual being; we are challenged from
the first page to confront or demur our own answerability to the intratextual
translator Sir Raif—who, in turn, struggles with his own answerability for his
experiences in pre-Nazi Weimar Berlin, for his love affair with the German-
Jewish painter Maria Puder, and for the social vulnerabilities he has incurred as
a result of his translingual, transcivic habitus. The apparent result of all of this
answerability for Raif, back at his desk in Republican Ankara, is guilt, shame,
and a desire to disappear—inevitabilities that Bakhtin foresaw as the unfortunate
essentials of artistic practice:

What guarantees the inner connection of the constituent elements of a person?

Only the unity of answerability. I have to answer with my own life for what I
have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have experienced
and understood would not remain ineffectual in my life. But answerability
entails guilt, or liability to blame. It is not only mutual answerability that art
and life must assume, but also mutual liability to blame. . . . The poet must
remember that it is his poetry that bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life,
whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is
due to his willingness to be unexacting.
(Bakhtin 1990, 1)

Raif’s self-annihilating shame throughout the novel arises not only from his
failed love affair with Maria Puder, “the Madonna in the fur coat” in Weimar
Berlin, but—on a meta-textual level—from his answerability to the vexing pal-
ette of linguistic diversities immanent in his and Ali’s translative authoriality,
which indeed are at acute political cross-purposes with one another. Their con-
joined authoriality comprises:

1 The habitus of a Republican writer subject to the state-enforced language

engineering projects of the 1920s onward.
2 The habitus of a late-Ottoman aesthete enamored of transnational, sty-
listic, and intertextual canons that were, in their imperial context, often
agnostic toward the Turkish nationalist agendas that would succeed the
Empire.
3 The German cultural and linguistic realm in which Raif’s translingual
imagination came into full bloom, ten years prior to the novel’s opening
scene.
4 The pragmatist, monolingualized, and commercial “new/pure Turkish” lan-
guage ideologies of the early Republican period, which precaritized authors
like Ali and Raif.
5 The accelerated diachronic axis of language change in early Republican
Turkey, a timespan upon which Raif’s language, the frame narrator’s lan-
guage, and Ali’s language constantly age out of contemporaneity, casting a
political pall on their texts and linguistic identities from only a decade prior.
 Translating the translingual novel 39
Politicizing diachronicity
How to fit into one novel each of these planes of linguistic practice (late Ottoman,
“new” Turkish, German as a Foreign Language, Weimar-era feminist discourse,
Republican-pragmatist business culture, and ever-evolving language engineer-
ing translation discourse) is a challenge that Ali indeed seems to have relished.
Having published a novel in which a bank employee circa 1940 meets a transla-
tor, who bequeaths to him a hand-written manuscript from 1933 that speaks of
experiences abroad in 1924, Ali appears to have designed the novel in such a
way as to involve the entire span of Republican Turkey’s linguistic reform cam-
paigns (though pre-Republican modernist reforms had indeed begun much earlier
in the post-1839 Tanzimat, or “Reorganization,” period of Ottoman civil society).
This chronodiverse linguistic design of Sabahattin’s last novel, utterly legible in
a Turkish-language context, threatens to lose its purchase on readers in translated
English, which is a fundamentally unengineered language that can recreate little
of the accelerated, politicized chronodiversity of modern Turkish.
So acute was this linguistic transformation in the first half of the twentieth
century that late Ottoman novelists like Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil often rewrote or
retranslated their own novels—such as, in Uşaklıgil’s case, Mai ve Siyah/Blue
and Black, which he translated, transposed, and transliterated into the new “pure
Turkish” some four decades after having composed it first in Ottoman. Indeed,
few English speakers can imagine the everyday sociolinguistic implications of a
performative claim like the following, from the 1942 Working Paper of the Fourth
Congress of Turkish Linguistics, penned while Ali was writing Madonna: “We
will spare no effort in purifying our language of foreign rules and words, in mak-
ing written language closer to spoken language, and in Turkifying the language
usages of the state and of the sciences” (Szurek 2015, 68).
Sabahattin Ali registers these chronodiverse linguistic features in Madonna by
way of a dissonance between the quotidian vocabulary of the frame narrator and
that of the enframed hero Sir Raif, whose syntax tends to be more Ottoman in its
complexity. Here are two examples of Raif’s typically Ottoman usage:

Çok kere lügat aramaya bile tahammül edemez, cümlelere karineyle mana
vererek geçerdim.
(Ali 2011, 55)

Frequently I couldn’t bear looking something up in the dictionary, and I’d try
guessing the meanings of sentences based on clues.
(Ali 2013, 57)

O sıralarda Maria’nin da birtakım tezatlı hisler içinde bulunduğunu

anlıyordum. Bazan aşırı derecede durgun, hatta soğuk oluyor, bazan da bir­
denbire coşuyor, bana, nefsime menettiğim cesareti verecek kadar müfrit bir
alaka gösteriyor, adeta beni açıkça tahrik ediyordu.
(Ali 2011, 112)
40 David Gramling and İlker Hepkaner
I understood back then Maria was also having contradictory feelings. Sometimes
she would be extremely quiet, even cold, but some other times, she would sud-
denly effervesce and show me such extreme interest that granted me the kind
of courage my character ordinarily refused me, or overtly taunted me with.
(Ali 2013, 129)

Particularly this second passage—a recollection (fictionally) written in the 1930s

of an event that occurred in the mid-1920s—demonstrates the kind of syntax and
usage that are routinely edited out of a novel-in-translation, if it is to be considered
“contemporary literature.” The problem is, of course, that contemporaneity is itself a
difficult conceptual plane to translate. Though such formulations in Ali’s text would
be expected from early-twentieth-century Anglophone authors like Henry James,
they are often perceived to be a prolix hindrance to translation when composed
by allolingual writers such as Sabahattin Ali. A choice to set aside Ali’s complex
and politicized stylistic heteroglossia in translation, in the pursuit of a more easily
accessible novel in English, may perhaps be defended in some cases of World
Literary dissemination—but not if language use is itself the primary vessel for cul-
tural critique, as it is in Madonna. The temporal structure of the Madonna novel in
fact deliberately foregrounds this problematic. Consider for instance the difference
in formulation between the utterances of the frame narrator in 1943 and those of
the protagonist Raif in 1933 (writing about 1924), as each character respectively
describes a bedside vigil over his beloved friend. The frame narrator’s description
in 1943 tends toward tropes of aphasia and noncomprehension:

The sick man opened his eyes halfway, he looked at me as if he didn’t recognize
me. Then, with a great effort, he looked toward his wife and daughter, murmured
a couple incomprehensible words, and made some signals with his contorted face.
(Ali 2013, 43)

Ten years earlier (in the time of the novel) Raif had described his bedside vigil
with no such sense of distance, inarticulacy, or oblivion:

I think I must have done nothing but go sit at her bedside, watch her perspir-
ing face, her eyes fading in and out, her chest perspiring laboriously. I must
not have even been alive, because if I had been alive, I would now have at
least a faint memory of those days. I just remember a tremendous fear, of
losing her. Her fingers jumping out of the bed, her feet bloating out from the
sheets, this all bespoke a deathly circumstance. Even her face, lips and smile
seemed to be waiting for a moment, an opportunity to submit to this horren-
dous transformation . . . What would I do then?
(Ali 2013, 156)

This divergence in Ali’s characters’ language use (including tone, usage, and concep-
tual/semantic precision) may perhaps be chalked up to situational differences in
habitus, personality, or homo/heterosocial dynamics, but on a broader scale the
 Translating the translingual novel 41
novel is designed to generate a parallelism between the frame narrator and Raif
on the one hand, and Raif and Maria on the other. The stark contrast between the
two linguistic repertoires, which the two figures call upon in each case to relate
a crucial near-death scene, suggests an underlying radical change in linguistic
practice itself over the intervening decade. Moreover, the ways in which the two
characters identify institutions, calendrical names, academic disciplines, and pro-
fessions differ widely—a fact that indeed led the Yapi Kredi Publishing House
in later printings of the novel to intervene and explicate Ali’s (that is, Raif’s)
language. In embracing the diachronic linguistic upheaval of the era, Ali appears
to be experimenting with linguistic chronodiversity in a context of the politiciza-
tion of everyday language. This critical experimentalism can be understood on
a continuum with other such critical aestheticizations of language engineering,
including the post-modernist Turkish novelist Bilge Karasu’s pursuit of an ultra-
purified Turkish in his fiction in the early 1970s (Dickinson 2014, Aji 2013).
It would be tempting for historical sociologists—and indeed translators and
translation archaeologists—to oversimplify the language reform process in retro-
spect, seeing it as a linear, progressivist development. But the process of linguistic
reform, which began arguably in the 1860s and continued long after the Turkish
Language Institute was defunded in 1951, had been subject at every turn to social
contingencies and logical inconsistencies, and to changing relations in the field of
political power. From a sociolinguistic point of view, then, it would be overreach-
ing to attempt a uniform linguistic profile for Raif and his enframed manuscript
from 1933, or to expect the novel’s latter-day frame narrator to refrain consist-
ently from Ottoman usages. While one could indeed scan the text for neologisms
that simply did not exist until they were constructed by committee in the late
1930s—that is, philosophical terms to replace those that had been routinely traf-
ficked in Ottoman scholarship—anything more inductive than such a neological
audit would subject the novel’s characters to unduly strict categorization amid the
heteroglossia generally expected of a novel such as this.

De-authorizing translation?
And yet, translators of Turkish into English are simply not permitted to overlook the
recalcitrant semiodiversity specific to the period 1920–40 in Turkish letters. Indeed,
this predicament of intralingual and multilingual literary composition is one that Ali
was clearly hesitant to pass on to posterity, or at least he performs that gesture of
resistance vigorously through Raif. One day at the office, Raif is reading over his own
journal from his days in Berlin, when the narrator catches him in the act. He asks:

“What’s that Mr. Raif?” It felt like I had caught him in a moment of delin-
quency, since he blushed and stuttered “Nothing . . . Just a novel in German!”
and closed the drawer right away. Still, no one at the office thought he could
speak a foreign language. Maybe they were right, because his manner and
comportment never signaled that he could speak any language at all.
(Ali 2013, 6)
42 David Gramling and İlker Hepkaner
This moment of guilt and shame, in which Raif is caught red-handed, reminds
us as translators and readers of the adverse effect of border-crossing in social
milieus poised to carry out national projects at all costs: literary projects, language
projects, even certain translation projects. We are to understand that the notebook
(the text shut up in the drawer, which is the same one we are subsequently to be
reading) is a linguistic and philological wrench-in-the-works of nation building.
Its author—surrounded by modernist literary monolingualism and the compulsory
prerequisites of nation-building literature—accordingly performs various rituals
of self-deauthorization throughout. In their varying but parallel circumstances,
Ali and his hero Raif appear to have intuited that their respective texts would
only further undermine their tenuous perch in the Republican institutions that
tolerated them (the bank for Raif, the Ministry of Education and the Translation
Bureau for Ali). Several moments of profound doubt in the narrative indicate that
Raif’s adverse position as an ideologically opaque, apparently apolitical translator
brings him to the brink of psychological breakdown. Perhaps—the frame narrator
speculates—Raif’s transnational experiences were indeed in the end a fantasy,
and his translating mere gibberish?

Maybe they were right, since his behavior never quite signaled that he could
speak any language at all. We never heard any foreign words come out of his
mouth, we never encountered him talking about his language knowledge, and
we never saw a foreign newspaper or magazine in his hands.
(Ali 2013, 6)

Certainly, Sir Raif’s unwillingness to assert and disclose to his contemporaries

the nature and method of his translational authoriality has resulted in more scorn
than mystique, and these observations within the novel appear to function both
intratextually and metatextually, that is, refracting both Raif’s precarity and that
of the Madonna novelist himself: “No matter how reliable and industrious he was,
nothing could ward off the office disdain. A single typo in one of his translations
was enough for our Hamdi to send for him, or sometimes he would simply come
into our office to dress him down” (6).
Indeed, these troubles and anxieties were prescient on various levels, in and
beyond the narrative. While Ali’s other works became centerpieces of an emerg-
ing Turkish literary canon, the Madonna novel submerged into obscurity after its
publication in 1943 and only began to resurface amid the transnationalization of
cultural and literary studies in the late 1990s. It was then translated into German
in 2008 by Ute Birgi, amid a marked upswing in Turkish translation into German
since 2000.
Madonna is thus a dramatization, on multiple, intersecting levels, of the
dynamics of authorizing and deauthorizing translation as a practice and trans-
lations as projects. Raif’s fastidious and culturally competent translations are
ruthlessly rejected “in a brutish voice” (Ali 2013, 7) by the bank director for
supposed delays and typographical errors committed by one of the typists, not
by the translator himself. The unnamed frame narrator observes, however, that
 Translating the translingual novel 43
Raif “seemed to welcome his superiors’ unnecessary and unjustifiable scoldings,
always with the same calm and blank face. When handing in or retrieving trans-
lations from the typists, he thanked them with the same senseless smile” (Ali
2013, 7). Raif’s placid, self-annihilating stance toward the bureaucrats who profit
from his translations is not, however, a passive stance, as it first seems. After
being scolded once for someone else’s tardiness in typing up his latest translation,
Raif returns to his desk and commences scribbling on a pad of paper he likewise
intends for no one to see. The narrator surreptitiously picks it up, out of curiosity:

On this palm-sized piece of paper, I could see Hamdi [the bank director]. By
way of five or ten masterly crafted lines, he existed there in all his essence. . . .
[F]or someone who’d just witnessed the man shouting at top of his lungs
in the middle of this room, it was an unmistakable likeness. The mouth,
agape and rectangular with a bestial anger and an inexplicable coarseness,
scrunched up eyes drowning in helplessness no matter how hard they tried
to drill toward what they were looking at, the exaggerated nostrils expanding
upon the cheeks, lending the face an even wilder expression.
(Ali 2013, 7)

This covert ekphrasis indicates for the first time in the novel that we readers
are not merely being prompted to pity yet another invisible translator. Rather,
Raif’s structural effacement as a translingual author (in the broader context of
early Republican Turkish society) causes him to seek recourse in other extra-
literary aesthetic endeavors at realism. Like other symbolic repertoires proscribed
as insufficiently national from the 1940s to the 1970s—the headscarf and other
sartorial customs, the arabesque cassette tape, Kurdish language and identity—
translingual aesthetics become a surreptitious private and semi-public channel
for incipient critique, not only of banal nationalism but of the functionalization
of translation for short-sighted capitalist merchandizing. It is therefore a novel
constituted through and by translations and translingual practices, made precari-
ous amid abruptly shifting models of commerce, meaning, and statecraft, which
combine to render it particularly contemporary for twenty-first-century readers.
Raif eventually begs the narrator to burn his “German novel”:

Sir Raif had taken his arm out of the bed again and took my hand. “Don’t
read it!” he murmured, pointing across the room with his head: “Throw it in
there!. . .”
I looked at where he was pointing. I saw the iron stove with crimson eyes
shining through mica plates.
“Into the stove?”
“Yes!”
(Ali 2013, 20)

This final request, which the frame narrator naturally disobeys for our benefit, is
Raif’s attempt to annihilate his own authoriality, thereby perfecting it for himself
44 David Gramling and İlker Hepkaner
alone. This ever-present alternative fate for Raif and Maria—utter obscurity
through book-burning—continues to propel the narrative in a dialectical fashion
toward readerships far afield of Raif’s unhappy deathbed in suburban Ankara.

Conclusion
While Azra Erhat, Republican Turkey’s major translator of Homer, was willing
to call Turkey a “translation paradise” (Erhat 2002, 328), and others have gone so
far as to describe it as a “translation republic” (Kurultay 1999, 13), Sabahattin Ali
may be said to have experienced the early Republic of Turkey (1923–48) rather
as a translation purgatory or gauntlet-run, one with an afterlife even in today’s
publishing landscape.
Several factors have led scholars and publishing houses to belatedly, and then
urgently, turn towards the Madonna novel for translational and World Literary
purposes:

1 The rise in interest in Turkish–German migration since around 1990.

2 The fast-approaching public-domain release date of the novel (seventy-five
years after the author’s death), which precipitated a hostile outbid for the
novel’s US translation rights in early 2015.
3 The increasing reconception of World Literature canons around transnational
aesthetics, rather than around national representativeness, and the correspond-
ing tendency to prospect on Istanbul as a new bi-continental world-literary
capital.
4 What Paul Kai Matsuda calls the “lure of translingual writing” in the
Anglophone literary and writing-studies.

Matsuda is concerned about the recent curricular fervor for so-called translingual
writing, claiming that:

The assumption in this demand is that translingual writing is visible—that

negotiation is only acknowledged when it results in mixed language use,
leaving out the possibility that negotiation may have led the writer to adopt
the apparently dominant choice. But in translingual writing the process of
negotiating assumptions about language is more important than the product.
Restricting the scope of translingual writing to the end result can obscure
more subtle manifestations of the negotiation as well as situations where
writers make the rhetorical choice not to deviate from the dominant practices.
(Matsuda 2014, 481)

As Matsuda registers skepticism about the “lure of translingual writing,” it occurs

to us that translation practice itself is, ironically, often bracketed out of the frame
of such translingual inquiry as well. Translating The Madonna in the Fur Coat
required us as translators to come to terms, in the most granular way, with a chro-
nodiverse literary language that both epitomizes and challenges contemporary
 Translating the translingual novel 45
yearnings for new exemplars of translingual writing and for accessible translated
texts. Our endeavor to develop, from Ali’s 1943 novel, an English-language
manuscript that would honor the lyricism, terminological specificity, metalin-
guistic political overtones, and audience design immanent in and constitutive of
Madonna was a delightfully daunting task throughout our four-year collabora-
tion (including the editing process). Through it we were able to glimpse on a
small scale the unruly complexities that everyday translators, throughout early
Republican Turkey and its period of aggressive language reform, had to counte-
nance in the course of their daily work. Indeed, novels like The Madonna in the
Fur Coat, when read and translated in proper historical light, can exert a kind
of “weak messianic power” on the translingual and world-literary discourses of
today (Benjamin 1940).

Notes
1 All translations of the novel are from our final unpublished manuscript of December
2014, which has been embargoed by Penguin Classics until January 2019 after a hostile
outbid for the translation rights. Our manuscript had been under second-round blind-
peer review with a major university press until early 2015, when we received news
third-hand of the rights purchase and embargo, at which point we were compelled to
withdraw it.
2 The other founding Translation Commission members included Adnan Adıvar, Halide
Edip Adıvar, Saffet Pala, Bedri Tahir Saman, Avni Ba man, Nurettin Artan, Ragıp Hulusi
Erdem, Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, Nurullah Ataç, Bedrettin Tuncel, Enver Ziya Karal, Cemal
Köprülü, Abdülkadir nan, and Kadri Yörükoğlu (Aksoy 2010).

References
Aji, Aron. “Dilde Özgürlük: Bilge Karasu’nun Eserlerinde Yenilikçi Atılımlar.” Bilge
Karasu’yu Okumak. Ed. Doğan Ya at. stanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2013. 15–25. Print.
Aksoy, Nüzhet Berrin. “The Relation Between Translation and Ideology as an Instrument
for the Establishment of a National Literature.” Meta: journal des traducteurs 55.3
(2010): 438–55. Print.
Albachtan, Özlem. “Intralingual Translation as ‘Modernization’ of the Language: The
Turkish Case.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 21.2 (2013): 257–71. Print.
Ali, Sabahattin. Kürk Mantolu Madonna. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2011.
—––. The Madonna in the Fur Coat. Trans. David Gramling and İlker Hepkaner.
Unpublished. 2013.
–––. Madonna im Pelzmantel. Trans. Ute Birgi. Zurich: Dörlemann Verlag, 2008. Print.
Aytürk, İlker. “Turkish Linguists against the West: The Origins of Linguistic Nationalism
in Atatürk’s Turkey.” Middle East Studies 40.6 (2004): 1–25. Print.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Art and Answerability. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans.
Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” Gesammelte Schriften 1:2. Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 1940. Print.
Cheesman, Tom. Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions. Rochester:
Camden House, 2007. Print.
Cronin, Michael. Translation in the Digital Age. London: Routledge, 2013. Print.
46 David Gramling and İlker Hepkaner
Demircioglu, Cemal. “Translating Europe: The Case of Ahmed Midhat as an Ottoman
Agent of Translation.” Agents of Translation. Ed. John Milton and Paul Bandia.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. 131–59. Print.
Dickinson, Kristin. “Translating Surfaces: A Dual Critique of Modernity in Sabahattin
Ali’s Kürk Mantolu Madonna.” Transit 9.1 (2013): 1–8. Print.
–––. “Where Language Is Ripped Apart: Absence and Illegibility in Bilge Karasu’s The
Garden of Departed Cats.” Critical Multilingualism Studies 2.1 (2014): 106–28. Print.
–––. “Translation and the Experience of Modernity: A History of German Turkish
Connectivity.” Diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2015. Print.
Erhat, Azra. Güleyla’ya anilar. En hakiki mürsit. Istanbul: Can Yayinlari, 2002. Print.
Gramling, David. “What Is Turkish-German Studies Up Against? Thigmotactics and
Occidentalism.” Colloquiua Germanica. 44.4 (2014): 382–95. Print.
Konuk, Kader. East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey. Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 2010. Print.
Kurultay, Turgay. “Cumhuriyet Türkiyesi’nde çevirinin ağır yükü ve türk hümanizmasi.”
Alman dili ve edebiyatı dergisi XI. Studien zur Deutschen Sprache und Literatur (1998):
13–36.
Lewis, Geoffrey. The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success. London: Oxford
University Press, 2002. Print.
Mani, B. Venkat. Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish German Literatures from Nadolny to
Pamuk. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2007. Print.
Matsuda, Paul Kai. “The Lure of Translingual Writing,” PMLA 129.3 (2014): 478–83.
Print.
Parla, Jale. “The Wounded Tongue: Turkey’s Language Reform and the Canonicity of the
Novel.” PMLA 123.1 (2008): 27-40. Print.
Seyhan, Azade. Tales of Crossed Destinies: The Modern Turkish Novel in Comparative
Context. New York: Modern Language Association, 2008. Print.
Szurek, Emmanuel. “The Linguist and the Politician: The Türk Dil Kurumu and the Field
of Power in the 1930s–40s.” Order and Compromise: Government Practices in Turkey
from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Early 21st Century. Ed. Marc Aymes, Benjamin
Gourisse, and Élise Massicard. Amsterdam: Brill, 2015: 68–96. Print.
3 The translator takes the stage
Clair in Crimp’s The City
Geraldine Brodie

Introduction
The metanarrative of translation is a significant element for the practice of British
playwright Martin Crimp. His works are translated into over twenty languages,
and some are performed in translation before their English-language premiere.
Crimp (b. 1956) also translates French drama for performance in the English
language, and is the author of English texts for plays that were originally written
in German or Russian. However, translation is not only the system within which
Crimp operates, it also informs the content of his writing. Crimp’s engagement
with translation as a practice and phenomenon is particularly evident in his 2008
play, The City. Clair, the translator at the heart of Crimp’s play, interrogates the
activity and ontology of translation on many levels. Clair demonstrates and dis-
cusses the tensions between creation and reproduction in her own work through
what is seen and heard on stage, but Crimp also manipulates his construction
of Clair’s character to query the existentialism of translation and creation.
Ultimately, Clair gives up her struggle to populate an imagined (or translated)
city with characters who could live independently of her invention. “I was no
writer—that much was clear. I’d like to say how sad the discovery of my own
emptiness made me, but the truth is I feel as I write this down nothing but relief”
(Crimp The City 2008, 63). Clair’s admission addresses one of the central themes
debated by practising translators and academic translation specialists: is transla-
tion a creative activity, and what is the nature of the translator’s re-enactment of
the author’s invention?
Superficially, Clair appears content to retreat into the derivative work of trans-
lation. However, in the context of this play, The City, and this author, Martin
Crimp, nothing can be taken at face value. Clair is herself a staged representation,
or derivation, of a translator. Her creator, Crimp, is a writer and translator. The
play deconstructs the process of translation as invention, both in the person of
Clair and in the multiple narratives of text and performance. This chapter explores
the presence of the author in translation through an analysis of Clair, her trans-
lation practice, and the play in which she herself is invented. Martin Middeke
discusses “the openness of [Crimp’s] aesthetics and the perceptual multistability
it provokes” (Middeke 2011, 99); I argue that Clair’s inventor, Crimp, authorizes
48 Geraldine Brodie
translation as much in his authorial and textual multistability as in his foreground-
ing of translation as a concept and an activity.
The portrayal of multilingualism and translation on stage is not new: William
Shakespeare includes a short untranslated scene in French between Katherine,
princess of France, and her gentlewoman, Alice, in the second act of Henry V.
Later, towards the end of the play, Shakespeare has some fun with translation
when Alice translates badly as Henry woos Katherine to be his Queen—both
of these scenes have comic intent. However, plays in English that focus on
the translation process or explore its cultural significance are rare. María Irene
Fornés, the Cuban-American playwright and director, depicts the 1891 transla-
tion into English and staging of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in The Summer
in Gossensass, dealing with a wide range of issues arising in theater translation,
such as knowledge of the source language, tone of the translation, copyright,
casting, character analysis, secrecy in production, interpretation of the original
play, interpretation through translation, rehearsal processes, and speakability
(Fornés 2008). Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Translations explores hegemonic
interlingual practices in an examination of the British colonial naming operation
in eighteenth-century Ireland. These plays foregrounding translation are com-
posed by authors who engage with the process of translation, but they display
more than an awareness of the potentiality of translation: translation itself plays
a central role. Similarly, the fictionalization of the translation process is seen
clearly in Crimp’s Clair—her practices and her persona. The City maps out the
increasing presence of the translator in the text. Is it possible to view Clair as an
avatar for Crimp? Clair’s presence in her own text is evident, but to what extent
is Crimp also present? This chapter explores the complex relationship between
translation and authorship and its staged representation in the multistability of
Crimp’s translator, Clair.

Theater translation and performance

What is particular to theater translation that rewards an examination of transla-
tion processes relating to the literary representation of the translator? Theater
translation is a form of literary translation, in that it deals with the transference
of a piece of creative work from one language into another. The nature of the-
atrical representation, however, imposes specific parameters that render theater
translation an applied process. Within the phenomenon of performance, a wide
variety of users of a translated play is implicit; the majority of such users—
the audience—will not actually read the translated text and will only receive a
proportion of the translation—the dialogue. Actors, who transmit the translated
text, relay the translation adding another layer of interpretation, consisting of
their own reading alongside their non-verbal conveyance of its content. Such
actors are among the agents—also including producers, directors, designers,
musicians, technicians, and other theater practitioners—who use the translated
text (including stage directions and other didascalia) as a tool for the fulfilment
of their occupation. Theater translation is thus differentiated from literary drama
 The translator takes the stage 49
translation; this dichotomy is examined in detail by translation theorists from Jiří
Levý, who identifies “the principle of selective accuracy” when translating for
performance (Levý 2011, 162), to Manuela Perteghella, who argues that adap-
tation for the stage is “a specific translational practice” (Perteghella 2008, 52).
Sirkku Aaltonen addresses the implication for translation of the divergences and
commonalities within drama and theater systems, finding that texts “may belong
to both or only one of the systems, and they can move in and out of them as well
as from one into the other” (Aaltonen 2000, 33). However, the effect of “page to
stage” is as much a feature of Theater and Performance Studies as of Translation
Studies. Academic fields of investigation into the dramatic staging of textual ele-
ments include the development of extended notions of dramaturgy as a “dynamic
and fluid conception” of the composition and analysis of theatrical texts (Turner
and Behrndt 2008, 4), and mise en scène, the “visible part of theatre” that “sets
literature into play” (Pavis 2013, xv). Furthermore, the discipline of Performance
Studies explores “non-theatrical cultural practices that [share] performance char-
acteristics with theatre” (Allain and Harvie 2006, 8). Such approaches inform the
study of theater translation in their investigation of textual and cultural interpre-
tations for performance.
Susan Bassnett (1985) initiated a debate on the significance of “performabil-
ity” in translating for the theater. Almost thirty years later, theater translation
theoreticians continue to grapple with this concept; Silvia Bigliazzi, Peter Kofler,
and Paula Ambrosi, for example, argue that a denial of the gestic subtext “only
reduces drama to a literary text deprived of performative thrust and translational
relevance in the context of theatre” (2013, 8). Whether or not performability is
translatable, the fact of performance prompts a specialized range of approaches
to the translation of texts for the theater, not least a form of co-authorship or
more extended collaboration between a translator and other theater practition-
ers to produce the text that is performed on stage. The resulting involvement of
non-linguist specialists in the translation process is controversial for theorists and
practitioners in translation and theater alike, and has generated an ongoing exam-
ination of the terminology used to describe translations in the theater, testing
the boundaries of translation and adaptation. The variety of terms employed to
describe a performed text that has derived from a source text in another language
is regularly increasing, and, as I have discussed elsewhere, there is “no consensus
on the definition or application of these terms” (Brodie 2013, 123). Contrary to
initial expectations, a “translation” may have been written by a target language
playwright based on a “literal translation” created by a language specialist; on the
other hand, a “version” may have been prepared by an expert linguist. Theater
translation offers a significant opportunity to study the relationship between lit-
erature and translation precisely because it demonstrates this range of processes
and terminologies, revealing the connections, but also the disconnections, that
allow us to examine the ontological function of translation. Furthermore, Crimp’s
theatrical writing, as I shall discuss, displays a variety of these translational pro-
cesses and terminologies. A personal engagement with the translation process in
its various forms is the source for Crimp’s theatrical examination of translation in
50 Geraldine Brodie
his play, The City. Through his translator, Clair, we can deconstruct the tensions
between translation and creativity.
Performance is key to Crimp’s writing and the translation of his work, and
is therefore central to the discussion in this chapter. However, the chapter does
not discuss in any detail actual performances of this play. The City received
its premiere(s) in 2008, opening firstly in German translation by Marius von
Mayenburg at the Schaubühne Theatre in Berlin on 21 March, and then one month
later in English, on 24 April, at the Royal Court Theatre, London. Even these two,
almost simultaneous, iterations of the play foreground the variably interpretive
nature of translation. The German production was directed by Thomas Ostermeier,
and presented in a double bill with Der Schnitt (The Cut) by the British playwright
Mark Ravenhill, thus highlighting new British writing for the theater. In London,
on the other hand, Katie Mitchell directed a reconceived version, in which not
only the language of the text, but also the stage design was presented without ref-
erence to the German production (to which no allusion is made in the play’s text
that doubles as a program). Set design, lighting, sound, costumes all combined to
offer a first-hand representation of the play by the English Stage Company, whose
aim was declared by its first director George Devine on its inception in 1956, “not
to be a producer’s theatre, nor an actor’s theatre [but] a writer’s theatre” (Little
and McLaughlin 2007). The context of the English-language production is thus
focused towards the writerly identity of Crimp, rather than his representational
quality as a British playwright.
Since these synchronous stagings, further productions of The City have been
performed in English, including in Melbourne, Australia (Red Stitch 2010) and
Los Angeles, USA (Son of Semele 2012). The play has also been performed in
translation further to the German production, including Catalan (La Ciutat, Sala
Beckett, Barcelona 2011, translated and directed by Victor Muñoz i Calafell),
French (La Ville, Rideau de Bruxelles 2015, translated by Philippe Djian), and
Spanish (La Ciudad, Festival Internacional de Dramaturgia Europa + América
2014, Buenos Aires, translated by Constanza Brieba). Critical analyses of specific
productions include discussions by Vicky Angelaki (2012, 27–9); Mireia Aragay,
Clara Escoda, and Enric Monforte (2014, 386–9); Aleks Sierz (2013, 229–30);
and Liz Tomlin (2014, 376–7). This chapter, however, reads Crimp’s play as
text and performance, given his instinct to protect his creations; as he explains,
“My plan is to go into a rehearsal room with a non-negotiable document” (Crimp
and Sierz 2016, 114). Crimp writes performability into his dramatic compositions,
including the performative act of translation.

Martin Crimp, translator

Martin Crimp is principally known as the author of contemporary experimental
writing for British theater, and has been described as “one of the most versa-
tile, creative and aesthetically prolific and challenging playwrights of our time”
(Middeke 2011, 82). Crimp’s position in the English-speaking dramatic cul-
tural field is demonstrated, along with other indicators, by the extent of critical
 The translator takes the stage 51
literature devoted to his work. Book-length examinations of his compositions have
been published by Sierz (2013), Angelaki (2012), and Clara Escoda Augustí
(2013), and Crimp is included in volumes on contemporary British playwrights
such as the Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights
(Middeke, Schnierer, Sierz), and Fifty Modern and Contemporary Dramatists
(Gale and Deeney). Additionally, reference works such as the Oxford Companion
to English Literature and the Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance
include entries on Crimp. Dan Rebellato’s record in the latter describes Crimp as
an “English playwright”, although concludes with the information that “Crimp
has also been acclaimed for translations of plays from French” (Kennedy 2010).
In fact, the number of Crimp’s translations and adaptations is significant in com-
parison with his original work. Sierz’s second edition of The Theatre of Martin
Crimp lists fourteen published play editions (eight of these playtexts are repro-
duced in collections) and fifteen “translations” (two of which are duplicates).
Three of these “translations” have German source texts (Bertolt Brecht’s The
Jewish Wife, Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youth, and Botho Strauss’s Big and
Small) and a fourth is from the Russian play The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
(Sierz 2013, 274–5). Crimp thus displays a willingness to work from languages
other than French, in which case he relies on an intermediate “literal” translation,
as discussed earlier.
Should Crimp’s English rewordings of German and Russian plays be labelled
“translations”? Vicky Angelaki’s 2012 appendix to The Plays of Martin Crimp,
detailing “original stagings for plays, adaptations, translations and versions by
Martin Crimp,” lists all of Crimp’s thirty-six theatrical writings at the date of
publication (Angelaki 2012, 187–99). Angelaki, however, does not attempt to
allocate her specified categories to the individual works, an implicit recogni-
tion, perhaps, of the porous boundaries identified by Lorna Hardwick “between
theoretical models for analysing ‘translations’ and ‘versions’” (Hardwick 2010,
195). Furthermore, Angelaki places selected adaptive writings by Crimp, which
she classifies as “radical adaptations,” within “Crimp’s playwriting canon.” These
include The Misanthrope, a direct translation from French, and Cruel and Tender,
Crimp’s rendering of Sophocles’ Trachiniae from Ancient Greek, an indirect
translation. Crimp has categorized Cruel and Tender as “a new play based on a
pre-existing text” (Laera 2011, 216), suggesting that it is the purpose of the rewrit-
ing rather than the method of translation or degree of linguistic expertise that
governs the typology of the resulting text. Rather than attempting to identify the
translations among Crimp’s theatrical writing, it may be more fruitful to consider
Crimp’s activity as a translator, and how such activity informs his output—
intralingual, interlingual, and the intersemiotic in its broadest sense of transposing
thoughts into text, and text into action.
Examining Crimp as a translator through the medium of his varied writings
permits a study of translational features within the plays of his own authorship.
Attempts on Her Life (2005), a seventeen-scenario play simultaneously develop-
ing and deconstructing the many existential facets of an absent character, Anne/
Annie/Anya, has been described by Rachel Clements as a work of “rememberers,
52 Geraldine Brodie
commentators and ventriloquists” (Clements 2014, 356). These terms are recog-
nized metaphors of translation in its intertextuality, revisions and reproductions.
Crimp’s play also explicitly utilizes translation in Scenarios 7 and 16, indicating
in his stage directions that the production should incorporate consecutive interpre-
tation of the lines spoken (Crimp 2016). In both scenarios, however, translation
serves to destabilize the onstage action and alienate the audience. The delayed
action of translating into English from “an African or Eastern European language”
in Scenario 7 magnifies the force of uncomfortable imagery, for example, in the
phrase “No man ever rapes and kills a woman in the Anny [a new model of a car
in this iteration] before tipping her body out at a red light along with the contents
of the ashtray” (Crimp 2016, 234–8). Scenario 16 ends in a cacophony of three
languages spoken simultaneously, with translation contributing to the violent
menace of the scenario in a grotesque pastiche of neutral mediation.
Crimp’s approach to translation in his writing is in tune with his “dramaturgy
of collapse and testimony” (Escoda Agustí 2013, 320). If dramaturgy is a form
of translation, and vice versa, it is no surprise that Crimp’s voice speaks recog-
nizably in all his theatrical writings, be they originals, adaptations, translations,
or any other classificatory terminology. Crimp’s idiolect can be traced through
a range of his outputs to demonstrate his ownership of the written text (Brodie
2016). His engagement with translation, and the nature of his translational activ-
ity, can therefore be gauged as much from his treatment of translation, as a topic
for investigation as from a study of his translated texts. His play The City, with the
centrality of the translator Clair, documents the presence of the translator in the
text, even where the text, the translator, and the play itself are literary fabrications.

Clair, the translator

This chapter may by now have given the impression that Crimp’s The City is
principally a play about translation. Translation, however, is only one theme
among “many dizzyingly different strands,” identified by Angelaki as a “focus
on the side-effects of capitalism,” an “exploration of the art-in-life concept,” an
“engagement with current affairs,” a return to “the couple as nucleus for activity,”
a “strong dosage of social context,” and “even . . . a metaphor for [the translation]
process and the translator’s role” (Angelaki 2012, 24–6). Angelaki reports that the
reaction of the critics at the London opening “reflected the interpretive puzzle,”
but there was a general agreement that “the play resonates strongly by means
of Crimp’s aptitude for depicting the scale of the impact of modern capitalism”
(Angelaki 2012, 26).
The action of the play unfolds around a couple, Clair and Chris, their neighbor,
Jenny, and their two small unnamed children, only one of whom is represented
on stage. The interweaving narratives, conveyed by means of non-sequential
and elliptical dialogue between the characters, reveal that Clair has met a writer
named Mohamed, who has been subjected to torture. Mohamed gives Clair a
blank diary that was intended for his daughter. Clair is a translator, possibly trans-
lating Mohamed’s work, and attends a translation conference in Lisbon at his
 The translator takes the stage 53
invitation. Chris has been working in a large organization in an unspecified pro-
fessional capacity, but discovers that he has lost his employment when his security
pass ceases to operate. He eventually takes a new job behind the meat counter at
a branch of a supermarket chain. Jenny works unsocial hours as a nurse, and her
husband is a military doctor serving overseas. Jenny complains about the noise of
the children playing while she tries to sleep. She insinuates that the children are
fighting unsupervised in their playroom. Later, Jenny returns, bringing a knife as
a present. The nameless Girl tells her father that her mother is hiding a diary. In
the final Act, bringing all four characters on stage together for the first time, Clair
gives the diary to Chris, who reads aloud what Clair has been writing: how she
invented a city with characters, but was unable to make them “come alive” (Crimp
The City 2008, 62). As Chris reads, it appears that not only Mohamed but all of
the characters on stage have been invented by Clair, including herself. The play
ends with the Girl practicing a piece on the piano, and playing a few notes over
and over as she is unable to get past the fourth bar.
The characteristic Crimpian multiplicity of layers of meaning and content in
The City has generated significant comment and critical review; notwithstanding
this range of interpretations, the translator Clair forms the center around which
the other characters and the action of the play revolve. An investigation of her
character therefore provides an opportunity to scrutinize practical and theoretical
approaches to translation as Crimp presents them in his play. Crimp, however,
also provides two peritextual indications of his predilection for the examination
of translation. The first is a quotation from Fernando Pessoa on the opening page
of the published text: “Everything we do, in art and life, is the imperfect copy of
what we intended” (Crimp The City 2008, 5). The second reference to translation
does not appear in the English peritext, but can be found in the published French
translation by Philippe Djian, set out below a French translation of the Pessoa
extract. This second citation constitutes a more overt allusion to translation, rec-
ognizing the agency of the translator and coupling translation with writing. “Les
questions du traducteur trouvèrent une réponse rapide” [“the translator’s ques-
tions met with a speedy response”—my translation] is a quotation from Peter
Handke’s Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers [The Afternoon of a Writer] (Crimp, La
Ville 2008, 9). These two passages also preface the German translation (Crimp,
Die Stadt 2008), suggesting that Crimp was instrumental in their inclusion. What
light do these allusions shed on Crimp’s approach to translation and its fictional
embodiment in Clair? Clair’s onstage translation practice creates echoes that rip-
ple through the play and into the study of translation as a discipline.
The concept of the imperfect copy is central to the portrayal of translation in
The City. Clair’s opening narrative, in which she recounts her first meeting with
the writer Mohamed, describes a little girl in pink jeans being led away by a
woman with a nurse’s uniform under her coat, and introduces the diary given to
Clair by Mohamed. The authenticity of this history is supported by the onstage
diary Clair shows to Chris; the book may or may not be removed from its plain
paper bag for this evidence—the stage directions are silent on this matter—but the
trope of layering and reflexivity is thus established at an early point in the play.
54 Geraldine Brodie
Only in Act Two does it become clear that Clair has a professional interest in
translation, the scene opening to show her working at a computer while referring
to “a book or manuscript,” the antithesis of “writing something of [her] own.”
The reiterative quality of Clair’s work is emphasis by the double repetition of
“bored with it” (Crimp The City 2008, 16). But if translation is a derivative activ-
ity of transference, the copy can also come to life, as becomes apparent when a
third character is led onto the stage by Chris, “a woman, Jenny, who is wearing a
nurse’s uniform under her coat” (Crimp The City 2008, 17). Like the diary, Jenny
is an embodiment of a feature of Clair’s initial story, and, also like the diary, this
evidence of reality is witnessed by a third party. Chris’s corroboration is the per-
formative act that transforms the imitative copy into a (staged) independent being.
Clair is thus presented as the derivative inventor of the other characters in the
play, but she requires a facilitator, Chris, to complete the creation. Copies prolif-
erate during the course of the play: Jenny describes a pulverized city, which is
mirrored in Clair’s destroyed city of the diary; the Girl, who we assume to be the
daughter of Chris and Clair, wears an “exact copy” of Jenny’s nurse’s uniform
on her first entrance (Crimp The City 2008, 42); and then in the final scene both
she and Jenny are dressed “exactly alike” in the pink jeans of Clair’s initial nar-
rative (Crimp The City 2008, 63). In each case, these copies are neither identical
(although described as “exact,” the clothing must vary in size), nor is it clear
which version is the “original.” Liz Tomlin considers that Crimp’s intention is
to suggest “the underlying indeterminacy of the world he is authoring” (Tomlin
2014, 376). The character list and stage directions, Crimp’s direct intervention
in the playtext, support this authorial indeterminacy in their blankness on time
and place. However, Clair, the translator, is also the author of this indeterminate
world, making a further link between creation and translation.
The dialogue between an author and his characters and the consequent para-
doxical authorization and destabilization of the creating voice is an established
dramatic trope. Sharon Wood views Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play, Six Characters
in Search of an Author, as a work in which “theatre becomes translation bod-
ied forth by the actors, the director and the audience, . . . for each Character,
performance is the path to signification, to having their interpretation hailed as
dominant truth” (Wood 2013, 143). Pirandello’s director loses control of his
characters, as they subvert and take over the performance, questioning their crea-
tor while simultaneously corroborating the knowingness of the author who has
ultimately scripted the play. Like Pirandello’s “Director,” Clair gives up on her
characters. Clair claims that her inventions only “lived a little” (Crimp The City
2008, 62), but in performance the audience has seen these characters come alive
and question their creator. Performance bestows existence and meaning on Clair’s
characters—these imperfect copies of Clair’s invention.
Is it defensible to conflate Clair with her own creator, Crimp, in an examination
of Crimp’s approaches to translation? Crimp describes creating himself as a trans-
lator: “I started to read and reread and invented myself as a translator” (Aragay
and Zozaya 2007, 63). As Clair, Crimp searches for the creation of meaning in the
practice of translation, only finding frustration and imperfection. Crimp and Clair
 The translator takes the stage 55
dissect the parallels between translation and creation, ultimately falling back on
invention to justify their activity. The self-reflexivity of translation as metaphor
and practice presents Crimp and Clair as inventions, but if Clair is the invention
of Crimp, is it not possible that Crimp is also Clair’s invention? Again, we see the
translator authorized by means of, rather than in spite of, the indeterminacies of
her (or his) activity.
If the trope of “imperfect copy” deconstructs the output of the translator’s
activity, Crimp’s second quotation, only seen in translations of The City and not
the original, investigates the input. The quotation “the translator’s questions met
with a speedy response” highlights the agency of the translator, the poser of ques-
tions. The identity of the responder to these queries is indeterminate, as is the
resolution of the questions. They are quickly dispatched, but is the response con-
structive or dismissive? The translator is again placed at the center of the field
of activity, rather than the author of the source text, and it is significant that this
quotation appears in circumstances where Crimp’s authorship has been mediated
by another translator. The reference suggests the recognition that the text has been
handed over for possession by the translator, in the same way that Crimp takes a
form of ownership of the texts that he translates.
Philippe Djian and Marius von Mayenburg both translate directly into their
mother tongues from English, and are also particularly well-qualified to translate
Crimp’s work. Djian is an award-winning playwright and novelist. Several of his
novels have been adapted into screenplays, including 37,2º le Matin (1985), which
under the English title of Betty Blue was nominated for an Academy Award in
1987. Djian lists seven translated plays on his website: five works by Martin Crimp,
including The City and The Country, and two plays by Harold Pinter, including a
retranslation of The Homecoming for the 2012 production at l’Odéon-Théâtre de
l’Europe directed by Luc Bondy (Gallimard). Djian, might therefore be considered
to hold a similarly esteemed status in the French literary system as is accorded to
Crimp in the British theatrical system. Crimp himself places Djian in a similar
category to his own with regard to translation: “an amateur, in the true sense of
somebody who is doing something for the love of it” (Crimp and Sierz 2016, 103).
Crimp’s usual German translator is Ulrike Syha, also a German playwright.
The City, however, was translated by Marius von Mayenburg. The Goethe
Institut’s website lists forty-four translations of von Mayenburg’s authored plays
into twenty-two languages, including Chinese, Hebrew, and Japanese (Institut).
As a dramaturg and translator for the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin,
von Mayenburg has worked closely with the director Thomas Ostermeier (who
directed the German production of The City). Although predominantly a transla-
tor of Shakespeare into German, von Mayenburg has also translated the work of
contemporary playwrights, such as Sarah Kane and Richard Dresser, in addition
to Crimp’s The City. Like Crimp, von Mayenburg engages creatively with the
translations of other writers: as a dramaturg he has collaborated on German pro-
ductions of other works by Sarah Kane and Eugene O’Neill, and he has translated
Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman based on the translation into German from
Norwegian by Sigurd Ibsen, the playwright’s son (Platz 2015). The Royal Court
56 Geraldine Brodie
Theatre forges a further link between Crimp and von Mayenburg: this theater has
staged several works by both playwrights, including von Mayenburg’s The Ugly
One (2007) and The Stone (2009) in proximity to Crimp’s The City (2008). Djian
and von Mayenburg circulate in very similar fields to that in which Crimp resides,
translating alongside the experience of being translated, and writing creatively for
performance in a variety of modes.
Crimp and his translators are thus professional theater practitioners, writers, and
translators, notwithstanding Crimp’s description of the translator as an “amateur.”
Clair encapsulates the tension between the amateur’s “love” and the professional
approach necessary for an effective translator. Clair carries out research, speaking
to “her” writer on the phone for hours and networking with other translators at
a conference (in Lisbon—an intertextual reference to Pessoa and the “imperfect
copy”). Clair is sufficiently expert in her career to present a paper at the con-
ference. And yet, she is unable to maintain a professional detachment from her
occupation; she is defensive of her work, disliking being watched and criticized
by Chris, and she becomes possessive of the source text author—possibly to the
extent of involvement in a sentimental relationship. From the beginning of the
play, Clair is drawn into the narrative of “her” author Mohamed, unable to main-
tain the dispassionate status of the intermediary that is so often associated with
translation, and which Crimp also undermines in Attempts on Her Life. As The
City progresses, Clair is increasingly entangled within her translation; the copies
proliferate, the narratives intertwine, and it becomes impossible to distinguish
reality from invention. Clair epitomizes the paradoxical creativity and destruction
of the translational act.

The City: translation or invention?

The City is often seen as a companion piece to Crimp’s earlier play, The Country
(2000). Both plays depict the apparently settled lives of conventional middle-class
families (mother, father, children, comfortable house, and professional employ-
ment). Clara Escoda considers that both plays “dramatize the effects of late
capitalism on character and intimate relationships” (Escoda 2014, 38). The central
focus of both plays is on the relationship of the couple and its potential disintegra-
tion in the face of life-changing circumstances: Richard’s drug addiction in The
Country and Chris’s unemployment in The City. These factors are further com-
plicated by the external intervention of a former lover (Rebecca in The Country)
or neighbour (Jenny in The City). However, these brief summaries fail to convey
the implicitly violent undercurrents and insidious personal and societal break-
down that generate severe moral discomfort and disorientation for the characters
and the audience. Quite apart from the counterpoint of the titles and the inferred
location of the plays, The City, like The Country, “subverts the predictability of
linearity through the tension and fragments of its unforeseeable content,” in Vicky
Angelaki’s assessment (Angelaki 2012, 30). Just as both plays end with a non-
verbal projection of inert continuation and repetition—the phone “continues to
ring” in The Country (Crimp The Country, 366); the Girl “can’t get beyond bar 4”
 The translator takes the stage 57
in The City (Crimp The City, 64)—The City pursues the theme of instability of its
forerunner, its imagery forecasting the structural collapse of society, the charac-
ters, and the play itself. This instability also interrogates translation.
The final lines of The Country raise questions around authority, simulation,
and character, issues of invention which can also be applied to translation. “Am
I not a character?” asks Richard or Corinne (the dialogue is not specifically
allocated to either of the scene’s protagonists, and arguably could be spoken
alternately by each of them). “Oh yes—you’re a character—very definitely a
character—but quite a different character” comes the reply (Crimp The Country
2000, 366). The reflexivity of this allusion to the invention of the author, Crimp,
and the shifting portrayal of Richard (or Corinne) and the reminder to the audi-
ence that this is indeed a play—an exercise of the imagination—draws attention
to the craft of the composition and the technical skills of the playwright. This
foregrounding of artistry is developed in The City simultaneously to undermine
and sustain translation.
Act One of The City establishes Clair as an authority on writers: she situates
herself among “people who know about writing” (Crimp The City 2008, 10).
When, in Act Two, it becomes clear from her working practices, and from her
husband’s intimations of her occupation, that Clair is a translator, the connection
is made between writer and translator, but also between translation and literary
criticism. Clair differentiates between the desk work of translating, which can
be “dull”, and the opportunities it gives her to meet authors, some of whom
are “real characters” (Crimp The City 2008, 16). As I have shown, Clair’s life
as a translator unfolds during the play, while the object of her translation, the
writer Mohamed, is increasingly obscured. Clair recounts a meeting with him
and further details of his life and family in Act One, and in Act Four attends a
translation conference which he organizes, bestowing a concrete existence on
this unseen protagonist. Nevertheless, the reflexivity of the term “character,”
just as this term is employed in The Country, problematizes Mohamed’s reality,
laying a trail of existential jeopardy for Mohamed and ultimately all the person-
ages, on stage or mentioned, in the play. According to Angelaki, from the story
in Clair’s diary “it appears that everyone and everything around Clair, including
herself and Chris, are figments of her imagination, mere cogs in constructing the
wider frame of her life” (Crimp The City 2008, 27). This interpretation suggests
that Clair in some way exists outside the diary. The diary, however, could rather
be a metaphor both for the (imagined) city in which the participants live and
work and for the act of invention/translation. The diary is not Clair’s creation,
but a receptacle in which Clair is created, a record of events that can only be read
subjectively and at second hand. Furthermore, the diary itself is a real object, one
of the few properties stipulated in the stage directions. It is onstage as the play
begins, “a flat object in a paper bag” (Crimp The City 2008, 7), and is closed by
Chris, whose reading from the diary forms the denouement of the play, as the
last lines are spoken.
The diary thus frames the play, undermines “truth,” queries creative writ-
ing, and requires a performative act (reading aloud by Chris) to be interpreted.
58 Geraldine Brodie
Ultimately, it fails in all these purposes. Middeke sees correspondences between
Derrida and Crimp in their treatment and use of “the iterability of a sign. . . . No
context surrounding a sign could ever capture it completely. It is precisely this
radical openness that displaces representation, meaning and (complete) under-
standing in Crimp into an ineluctable presence/absence” (Middeke 2011, 99). The
diary in The City represents fact and fiction. Intended for Mohamed’s daughter,
it passes through the hands of Mohamed, Clair, Clair’s children, and ultimately
Chris, before its contents are transmitted. Like Sirkku Aaltonen’s theater trans-
lation time-sharers (2000), each of these agents handle and interpret the diary,
leaving their marks to accumulate but never attaining resolution. Translation in
The City is thus endowed with the same “ineluctable presence/absence” as Crimp
himself; translation informs the content and the composition of the play, the
boundaries between creation/original and derivation/translation are insistently
teased and worried, but translation itself never appears at the center of the action
or conversation. The translator, however, is central to the play.

Conclusion
Elisabeth Angel-Perez observes that “The City revolves around the character of a
translator who in the end ‘authorises’ all the characters of the play as she may well
have invented them all” (Angel-Perez 2014, 354). Clair invents herself as a char-
acter within her translational narrative, blurring the boundaries between creation
and derivation, and investing the very imperfection of her copies with originality.
Clair’s inventor, Martin Crimp, authorizes translation as much in his authorial
and textual multistability as in his foregrounding of translation as a concept and
an activity, as he deconstructs the complex nature of translation as a social and
literary practice. The City can be read as a treatise on translation and creativity,
but also as an examination of the translator’s role in the text. By placing Clair
in a central position both within her own translated/invented text and within the
text he himself has created, Crimp underlines the reflexivity of translation. Clair
mourns the ruined city that she has failed to bring to life, but this void, or absence,
strengthens her presence as creator. The fictional translator reassesses her role in
the literary system, and steps out into the spotlight.

References
Aaltonen, Sirkku. Time-Sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre and Society.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2000. Print.
Allain, Paul and Jen Harvie. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Print.
Angel-Perez, Elisabeth. “Martin Crimp’s Nomadic Voices.” Contemporary Theatre
Review 24.3 (2014): 353–62. Print.
Angelaki, Vicky. The Plays of Martin Crimp: Making Theatre Strange. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.
Aragay, Mireia, Clara Escoda, and Enric Monforte. “Martin Crimp at Sala Beckett,
Barcelona.” Contemporary Theatre Review 24.3 (2014): 378–89. Print.
 The translator takes the stage 59
Aragay, Mireia and Pilar Zozaya. “Martin Crimp.” British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews
with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics. Eds. Aragay, Mireia, et al.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 56–76. Print.
Bassnett, Susan. “Ways through the Labyrinth: Strategies and Methods for Translating
Theatre Texts.” The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. Ed.
Hermans, T. London: Croom Helm, 1985. 87–102. Print.
Bigliazzi, Silvia, Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi. “Introduction.” Theatre Translation
in Performance. Eds. Bigliazzi, Silvia, Peter Kofler and Paola Ambrosi. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2013. 1–26. Print.
Brodie, Geraldine. “Schiller’s Don Carlos in a Version by Mike Poulton, Directed by
Michael Grandage: The Multiple Names and Voices of Translation.” Authorial and
Editorial Voices in Translation Volume1: Collaborative Relationships between Authors,
Translators, and Performers. Eds. Jansen, Hanne and Anna Wegener. Montréal:
Éditions Québécoises de l’Œuvre, 2013. 119–40. Print.
–––. “The Sweetheart Factor: Tracing Translation in Martin Crimp’s Writing for Theatre.”
Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 9.1 (2016): 83–96. Print.
Clements, Rachel. “Deconstructive Techniques and Spectral Technologies in Katie Mitchell’s
Attempts on Her Life.” Contemporary Theatre Review 24.3 (2014): 331–41. Print.
Crimp, Martin. “Attempts on Her Life.” Plays Two. Ed. Crimp, Martin. London: Faber and
Faber, 2005. 197–284. Print.
–––. The City. London: Faber and Faber, 2008. Print.
–––. Die Stadt. Reinbek: Rowohlt Theater Verlag, 2008. Print.
–––. La Ville. Paris: L’Arche, 2008. Print.
Crimp M. and Sierz, A. “UCL Guest session: Attempts on his life – Martin Crimp – playwright,
translator, translated.” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 9: 1 (2016): 101–116.
Djian, Philippe. “Philippe Djian: Traductions.” 2015. Web. 8/24/2015 2015.
Escoda Agustí, Clara. Martin Crimp’s Theatre: Collapse as Resistance to Late Capitalist
Society. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Print.
Escoda, Clara. “Violence, Testimony and Ethics in Martin Crimp’s the Country and the
City.” Ethical Speculations in Contemporary British Theatre. Eds. Aragay, Mireia and
Enric Monforte. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 25–41. Print.
Fornés, María Irene. “The Summer in Gossensass.” What of the Night?: Selected Plays. Ed.
Fornés, María Irene. New York: PAJ Publications, 2008. 47–97. Print.
Gale, Maggie B. and Deeney, John F., eds. Fifty Modern and Contemporary Dramatists.
London: Routledge, 2014. Print.
Gallimard. “Harold Pinter: Le Retour [the Homecoming].” 2012. Web. 24 Aug 2015 2015.
Hardwick, Lorna. “Negotiating Translation for the Stage.” Theorising Performance: Greek
Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice. Eds. Hall, Edith and Stephe Harrop.
London: Duckworth, 2010. 192–207. Print.
Institut, Goethe. “Theater in Deutschland—Theaterbibliothek—Marius Von Mayenburg.”
2015. Web. 11 November 2015.
Kennedy, Dennis, ed. The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.
Laera, Margherita. “Theatre Translation as Collaboration: Aleks Sierz, Martin Crimp,
Natalie Abrahami, Colin Teevan, Zoë Svendsen and Michael Walton Discuss
Translation for the Stage.” Contemporary Theatre Review 21.2 (2011): 213–25. Print.
Levý, Jiří. The Art of Translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Print.
Little, Ruth and Emily McLaughlin. The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out. London: Oberon
Books, 2007. Print.
60 Geraldine Brodie
Middeke, Martin. “Martin Crimp.” The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British
Playwrights. Eds. Middeke, Martin, Peter Paul Schnierer, and Aleks Sierz. London:
Methuen Drama, 2011. 82–102. Print.
Middeke, Martin, Schnierer, Peter Paul, and Sierz, Aleks, eds. The Methuen Drama Guide
to Contemporary British Playwrights. London: Methuen Drama, 2011. Print.
Pavis, Patrice. Contemporary Mise En Scène: Staging Theatre Today. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2013. Print.
Perteghella, Manuela. “Adaptation: Bastard Child or Critique? Putting Terminology
Centre-Stage.” Journal of Romance Studies 8 (2008): 51–65. Print.
Platz, Schaubühne am Lehniner. “Marius Von Mayenburg.” 2015. Web. 11 November
2015.
Sierz, Aleks. The Theatre of Martin Crimp. Second ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.
Tomlin, Liz. “Citational Theory in Practice: A Performance Analysis of Characterisation
and Identity in Katie Mitchell’s Staging of Martin Crimp’s Texts.” Contemporary
Theatre Review 24.3 (2014): 373–7. Print.
Turner, Cathy and Synne K. Behrndt. Dramaturgy and Performance. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Print.
Wood, Sharon. “The Pirandellian Mise-En-Scène and the Vanishing Translation.” Theatre
Translation in Performance. Eds. Bigliazzi, Silvia, Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi.
Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. 140–9. Print.
4 Invisible man
Sketches for a portrait of Mário
Domingues, intellectual and
(pseudo)translator
Alexandra Lopes

Avant Propos: of etymology, situatedness and the limits

of portraiture
[E]very portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of
the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is
revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas,
reveals himself.
(Wilde 1966, 21)

Etymology entails a particular brand of wisdom, a wisdom that produces, and

activates, meaning(s) that may lie dormant under the many layers of significance
words acquire in and through time. In this case, however, etymology inher-
ently translates the very nature of the present chapter, for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, the reflection I propose here is but a part of a larger ongo-
ing project that focuses on Mário Domingues (1899–1977), a polymorphous
intellectual, who has been all but forgotten in the course of the last fifty years.
While I contend that the impact Domingues has had on the fabric of literary
imagination of at least two generations has been unparalleled and commands
attention, the traces of his presence in, and activity on, Portuguese culture are
not easy to recuperate—time consuming as it is, archaeology is here of para-
mount importance, as the full scope of Domingues’s performance as a (pseudo)
translating intellectual and bold creator of a lavish pseudonymity is yet to be
fully acknowledged and assessed. Secondly, his was an existence marked by
a metaphorical “vagabundagem” [vagrancy], a concept I will return to later in
this article, as vagabundagem is a notion Domingues developed in his early
writings and one that can be advantageously applied to his public persona and
work, thus providing the contemporary reader with a clearer sense of who he
may have been (forced to be). Thirdly, a handful of other researchers, both
in Translation Studies and Sociology, have shown a lively interest in Mário
Domingues (see, for instance, the groundbreaking work by Moniz 2007 and
Garcia 2012). Unfortunately, the work has been discontinuous at best, mostly
for lack of funding and time.
62 Alexandra Lopes
Domingues’s overwhelming pseudonimity—the number of pseudonyms is
staggering: he used regularly more than ten aliases—invites debate on the liter-
ary, its conditions and possibilities, while questioning at the same time traditional
concepts of “originality” and “literary authority.” The attempt to enhance “the
reader’s reverie about the pseudonym” (Genette 1997, 50) deploys a Protean crea-
tivity that eschews clearly more ideologically charged concepts of “authorship”
in favor of an understanding of creation as playfulness. On the other hand, pseu-
donymity may open up an unfettered space, where the non-white intellectual can
experience a relative freedom, for, as Frantz Fanon argues, “[t]he black is a black
man; that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core
of a universe from which he must be extricated” (Fanon 2008, 2). Pseudonymity
can thus be construed as movement—a form of difference as dislocation that,
according to Stuart Hall, inhabits identity: “the notion of displacement as a place
of ‘identity’ is a concept you learn to live with, long before you are able to spell it.
Living with, living through difference” (Hall 1997, 135). Seen in this light, pseu-
donymity becomes an ambiguous marker, as it may translate the radical otherness
of the black man as a colonial subject—one of the many “white masks” forced
upon the black man who is always already perceived as “the stranger,” in Georg
Simmel’s sense (1971)—and at the same time it also refers back to the etymology
of “person,” as Boethius reminds us in The Consolation of Philosophy:

For the word “person” seems to be borrowed from a different source, namely
from the masks (personae) which in comedies and tragedies used to represent
the people concerned. Now persona with a circumflex on the penultimate
is derived from personare. . . . The Greeks, too, call these masks πρόσωπα
[prosopa] from the fact that they are placed over the face and conceal the
countenance in front of the eyes: παρὰ τοῦ πρὸς τοὺς ὦπας τίθεσθαι (from
being put up against the face). But since, as we have said, it was by the masks
they put on that actors represented the individual people concerned in a trag-
edy or comedy—Hecuba or Medea or Simo or Chremes,—so also of all other
men who could be clearly recognized by their appearance the Latins used the
name persona, the Greeks πρόσωπα.
(Boethius 1973, 87)

As a consequence, pseudonymity and person would share the common ground of

referring to masks, to that which is “placed over the face and conceal the coun-
tenance in front of the eyes”—in short, to a fiction of sorts. This fiction can, in
turn, be read as an act of translation, for Boethius claims that it was precisely the
mask that enabled the actors to represent individuals. It is the mask that allows for
the expression of individuality, as the mask is readable, relatable—it re-presents.
These are some of the conceptual imbrications and problems the present
reflection tackles, tentatively. It is perhaps apparent from these conceptual entan-
glements that translation, both literal and metaphorical, permeates the whole
discussion around Mário Domingues’s hide-and-seek performativity in the public
sphere, as I will attempt to show.
 Invisible man 63
The portrait of the artist as a jack-of-all-trades
[T]hey, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society.
(Rushdie 2010, 19)

Mário Domingues was born on July 3, 1899, on a farm in Príncipe Island (São
Tomé and Príncipe). His mother was a black Angolan indentured servant, his
father a white Portuguese clerk on the farm. Unable to release her from inden-
ture, Domingues’s father sent the eighteen-month-old child to live with his
grandparents in Portugal. Brought up in a loving middle-class family, he would
only “discover” his mulattoness at school, thereby confirming, mutatis mutandis,
what Hall has claimed about blackness: “It, too, is a narrative, a story, a history.
Something constructed, told, spoken, not simply found” (Hall 1997, 136). The
narrative of how the child figures his differentness out will be the object of his
1960 autobiographical novel, O menino entre gigantes/The Boy Amongst Giants.
Domingues studied Commerce at the French School, and became a bookkeeper
and a foreign language correspondence clerk. Fascinated by literature from a very
early age, Domingues made his literary debut in a journal for medical students
called A Alba. By the time he was nineteen, he published regularly in the news-
paper A Batalha. At first, he wrote mainly short stories and op-ed articles on the
Portuguese colonization in Africa. Soon he diversified both genre and media, and
published in-depth pieces of journalism, op-ed articles on art and colonial poli-
tics in a variety of periodicals, including ABC, Ilustração, Primeiro de Janeiro,
Civilização, Notícias de Lourenço Marques, O Detective, O Repórter X, and in
the periodical he himself had founded, África Magazine (see Garcia 2012). As
Garcia aptly puts it:

Nos muitos textos que escreveu e nas várias iniciativas editoriais que organizou
ou em que se envolveu revelou uma capacidade extraordinária para colocar na
corrente do discurso intelectual e político os sentimentos e os problemas das
comunidades colonizadas, num compromisso que dava voz às visões, valores
e comportamentos de outros sectores das chamadas classes subalternas.
(Garcia 2012, 461)

In the many texts he wrote and in the various publishing initiatives he either
developed or got involved in, he revealed an extraordinary capacity for put-
ting the feelings and problems of the colonized communities on the agenda
of intellectual and political discourse, thus showing an engagement that gave
voice to the ideas, values, and different types of behavior of other groups of
the so-called subaltern classes.
(My translation)

From 1919 onwards, and all through the 1920s, Domingues writes a series of op-ed
articles on the colonial empire and race, in which he questions Portugal’s mis-
sion civilisatrice. In “Cousas de estarrecer. O formoso jardim,” an article written
64 Alexandra Lopes
in 1921, that takes advantage of the conventional analogy of Portugal to a garden
near the sea, Domingues vehemently denounces racist discursive and social prac-
tices, anticipating some of Frantz Fanon’s critique by a couple of decades:

Eu não tenho capacidade para ser flor; o mesmo é dizer eu não tenho aptidões
“psíquicas” para ser homem. A consideração de que tenho gozado é um favor
das outras flores, é devida à “bondade” e à “doçura” dos homens civilizados.
Quando me orgulhava de ser gente, ofendia os brancos, os que são autentica-
mente pessoas.
(Domingues 1921)

I do not have the ability to be a flower; that is to say, I do not possess the
“psychic” capabilities required to be a man. The consideration I have enjoyed
is a favor of the other flowers, it is due to the “kindness” and “sweetness” of
the civilized men. Whenever I took pride in being a person, I have slighted
white men, that is, those who are authentically people.
(My translation)

During this period, he becomes a powerful voice in the defense of the eman-
cipation of black people as in the exposure of Republican nationalism and the
shortcomings of its colonial politics. According to José Luís Garcia, “[o] jovem
mulato Mário Domingues tomou a palavra na sua época de forma audível e terá
sido nesse período a mais influente das vozes contestatárias”/“Mário Domingues,
the young mulatto, was audibly vocal in the public sphere of his time, and may
have been the most influential of the contrarians of the period” (Garcia 2012, 418).
Within the context of this more engaged take on journalism, Domingues would
spend eight days living as a homeless person in the winter of 1930, in order to
write an in-depth piece on mendacity in Lisbon for Notícias Ilustrado, a piece
that would come out between March and April. Little could be gathered about
the impact of these feature articles on Portuguese society as of yet. However, the
experience as a homeless person led Mário Domingues to develop a proto-theory
on vagrancy that is very illuminating for the purposes of the present reflection.

Na alma de cada homem, lá no fundo, existe um vagabundo escondido. A

aventura atrai como um abismo, e o vagabundo é o profissional da aventura.
Não há quem não sinta a sedução da vagabundagem. Errar, ao acaso, pelas
madrugadas salientes, através das ruas adormecidas das grandes capitais;
perder-se, durante as tardes rumorosas, por entre a multidão; aventurar-se
por mares e continentes, gozando em segredo, sem ser visto, anónimo como
um insecto qualquer, o espectáculo dos grandes perigos, que mais tarde se
contam ao calor brando da lareira, dos costumes estranhos de povos exóticos,
que se fixam para sempre na nossa retina, das desgraças súbitas das quais se
escapa milagrosamente—quem haverá que não tenha sonhado, por momentos
ao menos, uma existência assim?
(Domingues 1930)
 Invisible man 65
In the soul of every man, deep down, there is a hidden vagrant. Adventure
lures like an abyss, and the vagrant is the professional of adventure. There
is no one who does not feel the appeal of vagrancy. To wander, without pur-
pose, through the protruding dawns, through the sleeping streets of the big
capitals; to get lost in the crowds in rustling afternoons; to venture the seas
and continents, enjoying the impressive show of great dangers in secret, with-
out being seen, anonymously as some sort of insect, in order to be able to
narrate them by the fireside, enjoying the show of strange habits of exotic
peoples, which forever take hold of our retinas, of the sudden disasters from
which one escapes miraculously—who has not dreamt, for a little while at
least, of such an existence?
(My translation)

This yearning for the vagabundagem becomes—I argue—a sign for Mário
Domingues’s interventions in the public sphere after the military coup of 28 May
1926, and the establishment of the Estado Novo dictatorship in 1933. In the wake
of these political events, he gradually lost visibility, and had to reinvent a voice
that enabled him to survive in adverse circumstances. The vocal black man, who
had enjoyed a measure of success within the anarchist movements of the 1910s
and 1920s, became more subdued, as he was ostracized by both the oppositional
movements and the oppressive regime. In a sense, he literally became the pariah
he had previously claimed everyone envied, at one stage or the other. Shunned
by opposite intellectual groups,1 Domingues seemed to dissolve into the realms
of invisibility—albeit his massive presence—in the publishing world of the 1930s
on to the 1970s, refocusing his activity on (translated) narrative.
Even though he had published fiction before the 1930s, as the volumes Hugo,
o Pintor (1922), Delicioso Pecado (1923), A Audácia de um Tímido (1923), Entre
Vinhedos e Pomares (1926), and O Preto de Charleston (1930) well attest, his
narrative fiction, both the result of an inclination and a necessity, would flourish
in somewhat unexpected ways from the 1940s onwards. Indeed, even the sheer
number of volumes published needs further enquiry.
Domingues published volumes of translations, pseudotranslations, original
novels and plays, and what might be termed works of popular history, mostly in
the form of biographies of historical figures. He earned a living writing books—a
not negligible feat at a time when most writers would have had day jobs—but,
paradoxically, this has compounded the invisibility surrounding him. In Lawrence
Venuti’s much quoted discussion of the concept, invisibility is, from the onset, a
paradoxical phenomenon:

It [invisibility] refers to at least two mutually determining phenomena: one

is an illusionistic effect of discourse, of the translator’s own manipulation
of the translating language . . .; the other is the practice of reading and eval-
uating translations that has long prevailed in the United Kingdom and the
United States, among other cultures, both Anglophone and foreign-language.
A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged
66 Alexandra Lopes
acceptable by most publishers, reviewers and readers when it reads fluently,
when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem
transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s person-
ality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text—the appear-
ance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the
“original.” . . . What is so remarkable here is that the effect of transparency
conceals the numerous conditions under which the translation is made, start-
ing with the translator’s crucial intervention. The more fluent the translation,
the more invisible the translator, and, presumably, the more visible the writer
or meaning of the foreign text.
(Venuti 2008, 1)

Mário Domingues may well be the perfect example of the erroneousness of the
fluency assumption. In fact, as I will try to show in the course of this chapter,
only the first part of the clause applies, for it is generally true that the more fluent
the translation and/or the “assumed” translation—Gideon Toury’s concept (1995,
31–5) fits well here—the more invisible the translator is to the reader, allowing
the latter the illusion that she or he is reading an original. This does not, however,
hold true for the second part of the clause: the author, and/or the meaning of
the foreign text, is not necessarily more visible when the translation reads well.
Often fluency points to an absence, a lack of presence and/or authority: either
because the locus of authorship is but a ruse—as it may be said to happen in play-
ful pseudonymy—and/or because authorship and translatorship conflate, in order
to produce new meanings, as in pseudotranslation.
Thus, the production of invisibility is more culturally complex and layered
than the simple disappearance of an authoritative voice might lead one to believe.
While it cannot be denied that translation, and possibly pseudotranslation, is work
for hire, which falls under Venuti’s apt description—“Work-for-hire contracts
alienate the translator from the product of his or her labor with remarkable final-
ity” (Venuti 2008, 9)—and consequently implies that translators receive neither
the remuneration, nor the symbolic recognition adequate to the work they do, it
should not be overlooked that this divestment of public power may paradoxi-
cally hide other, subtler forms of power. Therefore, I propose to take Venuti’s
concept and illuminate it from a slightly different angle, thereby hopefully high-
lighting possibilities of extricating past translators from the shadows they have
been plunged into.
Taking the view that “[t]he concept of the translator’s ‘invisibility’ is already
a cultural critique, a diagnosis that opposes the situation it represents” (Venuti
2008, 13), I would like to look not only—or mainly—into the effects of the prac-
tices aimed at rendering translators invisible, and effectively powerless, in the
public sphere, but also into the meanderings of the actual discursive practices
“invisible” translators engage in. While the surface result may be an apparent
textual transparency, more often than not what really happens, on the textual
level, is a thickness that introduces many a change in the translation, thus trans-
forming agency into an insidious practice. This does not, of course, mean that
 Invisible man 67
fluent translations and/or pseudotranslations do not mainly conform with main-
stream discursive practices in a given cultural community, but considering this
thickness helps us avoid hasty conclusions as to the helplessness of translators
operating in such a community. While the latter may be rendered politically invis-
ible, the performativity of the translating act produces meanings that do often
resist homogeneity and the erasure of difference, thus releasing covert potentiali-
ties and meanings. “The imagined communities fostered by translation produce
effects that are commercial as well as cultural and political” (Venuti 2013, 25)—it
is precisely these effects that an exuberant author-cum-translator, such as Mário
Domingues, provides ample evidence for.
As Luís Dantas sums it up, Domingues has left an impressive array of works
behind, and has helped shape the imagination of two generations, at the very
least:

Para lá das peças jornalísticas que deixou em jornais ou revistas, como

A Batalha, O Repórter X, Detective, Ilustração, o “Notícias” Ilustrado,
O Século, Primeiro de Janeiro, Renovação, ABC, Pátria, Civilização,
Vida Mundial, Sol, Notícias de Lourenço Marques, La Libertad (Madrid),
Mário Domingues traduziu para editoras portuguesas obras de Walter Scott
(1731–1832), William W. Collins (1721–1759), Charles Dickens (1812–870)
e foi autor de biografias de Fernão Mendes Pinto, Bocage, Fernão de
Magalhães, Luís de Camões, D. João VI, Cardeal D. Henrique, D. João III,
D. Sebastião, Padre António Vieira, Marquês de Pombal, Inês de Castro,
D. João V, D. Dinis e Santa Isabel, D. Manuel I, D. Pedro, D. Afonso
Henriques, D. Maria, Nuno Álvares Pereira, D. João IV, romances, novelas,
obras dramáticas, livros policiais ou de aventuras assinados com pseudóni-
mos inspirados em nomes ingleses ou franceses (William Brown, Henry
Dalton, Philip Gray).
(Dantas 2016)

Besides the journalistic pieces he wrote for newspapers and magazines, such
as A Batalha, O Repórter X, Detective, Ilustração, o “Notícias” Ilustrado,
O Século, Primeiro de Janeiro, Renovação, ABC, Pátria, Civilização, Vida
Mundial, Sol, Notícias de Lourenço Marques, La Libertad (Madrid), Mário
Domingues translated for Portuguese publishing houses works by Walter
Scott (1731–1832), William W. Collins (1721–1759), Charles Dickens
(1812–1870), and penned biographies of Fernão Mendes Pinto, Bocage,
Ferdinand Magellan, Luís de Camões, King João VI, Cardinal D. Henrique,
King João III, King Sebastião, Father António Vieira, Marquês de Pombal,
Inês de Castro, King João V, King Dinis e Santa Isabel, King Manuel I, King
Pedro, King Afonso Henriques, Queen Maria, Nuno Álvares Pereira, King
João IV, novels, novellas, theater plays, detective or adventure stories signed
with different pseudonyms inspired in English or French names (William
Brown, Henry Dalton, Philip Gray).
(My translation)
68 Alexandra Lopes
Whatever genre one might have preferred in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,
one was sure to have read a text penned by Domingues, as he translated many of
the authors of the great tradition and produced a staggering number of Westerns,
detective and adventure stories. He translated and wrote for more than ten pub-
lishing houses, and published 194 texts between 1923 and 1977. The “pariah, the
nobody, the common stranger, the anonymous, in tatters, unshaven” (Domingues
1930), that is, the vagrant—the metaphorical vagabond, living in the outskirts of
Lisbon and forced to find his uncertain home in fiction (most genres Domingues
cultivated, from the novel to historical biography, may be said to fall, albeit dif-
ferently, into this category), found an invisible way into readers’ imaginations.

The portrait of the translator as an insect

Constituting oneself as “black” is another recognition of the self through dif-
ference: certain clear polarities and extremities against which one tries to
define oneself.
(Hall 1997, 135–6)

[T]o venture the seas and continents, enjoying the impressive show of great
dangers in secret, without being seen, anonymously as some sort of insect, in
order to be able to narrate them by the fireside, enjoying the show of strange
habits of exotic peoples, which forever take hold of our retinas, of the sudden
disasters from which one escapes miraculously—who has not dreamt, for a
little while at least, of such an existence?
(Domingues 1930, my italics)

The above quoted digression, part of a reflection on the experience of actual

vagrancy, reveals a yearning that results—I believe—from a double exposure. On
the one hand, as a perpetual stranger in Georg Simmel’s sense,2 Mário Domingues
is always almost too visible in the early 1900s, because he is a mulatto and always
already the displaced other. As Stuart Hall argues:

Identity is formed at the unstable point where the “unspeakable” stories of

subjectivity meet the narratives of history, of a culture. And since he/she is
positioned in relation to cultured narratives which have been profoundly expro-
priated, the colonized subject is always “somewhere else”: doubly marginal-
ized, displaced always other than where he or she is, or is able to speak from.
(Hall 1997, 135)

This “elsewhereness” of experience, the fact that “one who is close by is remote,
but his strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near’ (Simmel 1971,
143), results in a hypervisibility that is portrayed in the autobiographical novel,
O menino entre gigantes (1960). The novel does justice to J.M. Coetzee’s defini-
tion of autrebiography, as the reader is well aware that “[w]henever someone
gives an account of a past event, even if he is a historian, we must take into
 Invisible man 69
account what he unintentionally puts back into the past from the present or some
intermediary time, thus falsifying his picture of it” (Coetzee 1997, 336). The first-
person narrative revolves around the early years of José Cândido de Meneses
Chaves, an alter ego of Domingues himself, who narrates his life story in order to
come to terms with who he is:

De uma só coisa tenho a certeza: não sou esta pessoa que tu conheces há
muitos anos pelo nome de José Cândido de Meneses Chaves, consoante têm
rezado os meus documentos de identidade. Este homem que tu conheces,
assim, mulato tão escuro que muita gente o confunde com negro sem mescla,
delgado de corpo, melancólicos olhos pretos, carapinha espessa, voz grave e
modos repousados, não sou eu.
(Domingues 1960, 7)

Of one thing only I am certain: I am not this person whom you have known
for many years by the name José Cândido de Meneses Chaves, according to
my identity papers. This man whom you know like this, so dark a mulatto that
many mistake him for an unmixed black man, with a slim body, melancholy
black eyes, dense kinky hair, deep voice and calm ways, is not me.
(My translation)

The novel is a highly interesting document of early twentieth-century Portugal,

showcasing the paradoxical experience of mixed-race children in a backward
country: living in a loving family environment, José Cândido is not aware of
being different until his true socialization process begins. It is when he comes to
Lisbon and starts attending school that he realizes he is different.

Nesse dia, o que se impunha ao meu espírito era a questão da minha cor. . . .
Dir-se-ia ser a primeira vez que me via [ao espelho] e que nem conhecia o
rapazito que se encontrava na minha frente. Não foi sem certa surpresa que
fiz reparo na mancha acastanhada do meu rosto a reflectir-se no aço polido;
nos lábios grossos e no cabelo crespo, tudo tão diferente do que eu estava a
ver nas outras pessoas. Ninguém era como eu.
(Domingues 1960, 172)

On that day, what moved me was the issue of my colour. It was as if it were
the first time I saw myself [in the mirror] and I did not even recognize the
little boy who was in front of me. It was not without surprise that I noticed
the brownish fleck that was my face on the polished steel; the thick lips and
the curly hair, everything so different from what I was used to see in other
people. Nobody was like me.
(My translation)

Thus, difference is part and parcel of the social existence of a mulatto in a middle-
class background in the early twentieth century.3
70 Alexandra Lopes
On the other hand, this hypervisibility is further enhanced by the fact that
Domingues embraced this otherness in rather equivocal terms. After all, he
was a paradox: he had been brought up in a white middle-class household,
that of his father’s family, and, growing up, he had developed no strong bonds
either to Africa or the African community in Portugal. He was therefore truly
displaced in the sense that he was inhabited by what Salman Rushdie calls
“a double unbelonging” (Rushdie 2013, 54). It is my contention that this
experience of a lived-in difference may help in understanding his clamor-
ous presence-absence in the Portuguese letters, particularly from the 1930s
onward.

First movement—allegro: pseudonymy and pseudotranslation

Todos têm tido um instante na vida em que desejariam apagar-se em sombra,
em fluido em que ninguém notasse, para observarem o mundo secretamente,
para não terem responsabilidades, nem cuidados, nem deveres, renunciando
para alcançarem tal ventura, a todos os direitos. É nesse instante que inve-
jamos o Pária, o Ninguém, o vulgar estranho, anónimo, andrajoso, mal bar-
beado que por nós passa pedindo-nos esmola e prossegue a marcha, de rua em
rua, de beco em beco, e se some no incógnito.
(Domingues 1930)

Everybody has experienced a moment in life in which he or she would wish

to dissolve into the shadows, into a fluid no one cared about, in order to be
able to observe the world secretly, with no responsibility, or care, or sense of
duty, renouncing every right to feel such bliss. It is in that moment that we
envy the Pariah, the Nobody, the common stranger, anonymous, in tatters,
unshaven, who passes us by, asks for an alm and goes on, from street to street,
from alley to alley, and disappears in the unknown.
(My translation)

The disappearing act becomes a constant feature in Mário Domingues’s

career, both as a translator and as an author. As mentioned earlier, he wrote
profusely and published many a volume of detective fiction and westerns,
under pseudonyms and as a pseudotranslator. Thomas Birch, James Black,
Fred Criswell, Marcel Durand, Max Felton, W. Joelson, Nelson MacKay,
Peter O’Brion, James W. Sleary, Joe Waterman, Henry Dalton, and Philip
Gray are but a few of the fictitious authors he created. Some of the works by
these “authors” came to light as “translations” by Mário Domingues, others
omitted the name of the translator, still others were “translated” by fictitious
translators—also the product of Domingues’s imagination. Whole collections
of adventure and detective stories and westerns were produced in this fashion
in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, thus contributing to the creation of a range
of literary genres that were not familiar to the Portuguese reader, and/or were
only familiar in translation.
 Invisible man 71
Mário Domingues, one of the pseudotranslators, invented more than 10 for-
eign authors, supposedly of French, English or American origin. One collec-
tion (Savil) consisted exclusively of novels by a certain W. Joelson, while
another collection (Detective) included several of Domigues’s pseudoau-
thors: Joe Waterman, James Black, Fred Criswell . . . , among others.
(Moniz 2007, 206)

Pseudotranslations (Toury 2012, 40–6) are, of course, nothing new, and they serve a
multitude of purposes, two of which are to meet the readership’s expectations as far
as genre is considered and to introduce new genres or text types into the receiving
community. What may perhaps be considered innovative, however, is the conflu-
ence of two performative acts that are, at the same time, “disappearing acts”: the
act of producing fictitious translations and the act of presenting it under different
pseudonyms. The levels of fictionality and complexity entailed in the convergence
of these two gestures are highly sophisticated, and seem to reveal a mischievous
pleasure in a polypseudonymity (Genette 1997, 51), which may, in turn, uncover
a transgressive gesture—that of undermining authorship as a single, authoritative,
original signature. The invisible author, who has lost terrain in the public sphere,
responds—by impish necessity—with an overwhelming pseudonymity.4
My argument is that pseudonymity provides an alternative stage, in which
Mário Domingues can play at being another—this playfulness may have two
different causes: one that is both playful and imposed by the necessity of mak-
ing ends meet; the other, which begs further research, would be existential—the
possibility of meeting expectations, of belonging, of resisting the mobility that
characterizes the stranger:

Restriction to intermediary trade and often (as though sublimated from it) to
pure finance gives the stranger the specific character of mobility. . . . The pure
mobile person comes incidentally into contact with every single element, but
is not bound up organically, through established ties of kinship, locality, or
occupation, with any single one.
(Simmel 1971, 145)

It is the insect-like quality all over again.

Second movement—andante largo: translation and canon

A novel is a world with borders. For there to be completeness, unity, coher-
ence, there must be borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take
within those borders.
(Sontag 2007, 224)

If a novel is a world with borders, a translator must be a sort of smuggler, for she/he
has certainly to cross borders in order to carry the work across. Performativity
in and of translation always happens elsewhere, in the trespass of borders, in the
72 Alexandra Lopes
movement between languages and cultures, in the smuggling and hybridization of
worldviews. Hence, the claim that translation is always intrinsically intertextual,
both in the literal and the metaphorical sense (Venuti 2013, 101).
Moreover, performativity in translation is always inhabited by transgression.
Regardless of how respectful and compliant the translator means to be, the desire
to translate a work is arguably always a gesture towards the displacement and
subsequent replacement of a text within a new context. “Universal” literature,
arguably the forerunner of today’s world literature, was a project aimed at dis-
seminating a canon of monumental works that, while written in diverse languages,
could well translate into all others. Great works were eminently translatable
because they were, naturally, “universal.” In countries like Portugal, such a pro-
ject would often be put in the service of an increasing literacy. For, in the words
of Matthew Arnold, “culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and
light” (Arnold 1932, 69)—literature as a moral compass.
As a translator, Mário Domingues has played a pivotal role in the shaping of
an understanding of literature for popular consumption. Overall his activity as
translator reveals a confident agent who does not shy away from intervening in
the texts he is rendering. For Domingues, “[t]o translate is . . . to lead something
across a gap, to make something go where it was not. Like tradition, something
which is handed ‘over’ or ‘down’ (originally, something material) to others,
translation is the conveying or transmitting of something from one person, site,
or condition to another” (Sontag 2003, 340), whereby the “others,” “another,”
that is, the receiving community, often take precedence over the source. In other
words, the act of carrying across a gap becomes of paramount importance, as it, to
some extent, echoes every part of Domingues’s experience, both as a professional
and as a person. Having himself been “borne across the world,” he is a translated
man (Rushdie 2010, 17). By being translated—again etymology matters, as “the
older meanings expressed in the tra- and trans- words (welded to -dere, -ducere)
remain an underpinning” (Sontag 2003, 340)—identity is (dis)placed in a continu-
ous mobility of meanings, experiences, and masks. Fanon, famously, underlines
the effect of racial masking:

“Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!”

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things,
my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I
found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.
Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others.
Their attention was a liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into
nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought lost, and
by talking me out of the world, restoring me to it. But just as I reached the
other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the
other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a
dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst
apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.
(Fanon 2008, 82)5
 Invisible man 73
The translatedness of being, as well as the re-placement of the fragments of the
self, shapes Domingues’s translatorship, as his is a continuous attempt to (re)fash-
ion the narratives into a cohesive discursive whole for a new audience. At times,
this implies, as we shall see, an understanding of “translation as obfuscation . . . , a
dressing up or paring down of the text, which may or may not entail actively tam-
pering with it” (Sontag 2003, 341). Nevertheless, translation becomes the locus of
a double contradictory gesture: on the one hand, it resists mobility by conforming
mainstream understandings of translation and trying to pin down the texts—thus
answering to a yearning to belong in the receiving community; on the other, it
entails transgression by releasing different meanings, and effectively opening the
text up for a new mobility.
This conumdrum is emphasized by the particular publishing environment
and cultural community Domingues worked in, an environment characterized
by a high level of illiteracy. It is estimated that 60 percent of the population in
Portugal could not read or write in the 1930s, and, even if three decades later the
percentage was cut down to half, this still meant that 33 percent was illiterate.
These facts can perhaps shed light on the constraints of the publishing market,
and do certainly explain the existence of collections, such as the by now infa-
mous Selected Works by Selected Authors (1944 to early 1970s) published by
Romano Torres.
The collection can be read as a large macrotext, framed as it is by a discreet
but effective paratextuality, one that presents and “authenticates” a canon of liter-
ary works.6 To some extent, this is achieved by a refiguration of the narratives it
engages with. Composed entirely of translated novels, the series constitutes both a
metadiscourse on the novel and a canon-forming undertaking, as most volumes in
the collection are translations of nineteenth-century novels of British or American
origin, which stands out in the otherwise Francophile publishing world of the
time. Out of the seventy-three novels that compose the collection, eighteen are
translations by Mário Domingues.
Domingues was, of course, a most productive translator, having published
more than fifty translations with a handful of different publishing houses: Agência
Editorial Brasileira, Livraria Civilização, Livraria Figueirinhas, Editorial Dois
Continentes, and Romano Torres. I am, however, particularly interested in his
collaboration with Romano Torres, for two main reasons: first, the publishing
house has had a tremendous impact on the constitution of a readership in and for
translation, and merits further research;7 and second, Mário Domingues published
over forty titles with Romano Torres. Half of them were popular biographies of
Portuguese kings and queens—what he termed “historical evocations”—and half
were translations of canonical authors.
His translations can be roughly divided up in two main groups: (a) a significant
number was constituted by popular novels by best-selling contemporary authors,
mostly of French or Spanish origin (writers such as Gustave Le Rouge, Pierre
Souvestre, Marcel Allan, Concha Linares Becerra, etc.); and (b) almost twenty
novels by authors of the “great tradition” (Henry Fielding, Walter Scott, Charles
Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot).
74 Alexandra Lopes
From this point onwards, I concentrate, however briefly, on his participation
in the canon-forming undertaking of Romano Torres, a publishing house which
played a crucial role in the producing of the fabric of popular literary imagina-
tion. As has been stated already, his translations of authoritative authors generally
attempt to create the “illusion of transparency” by insisting on a radical legibility:
“The illusion of transparency is an effect of a fluent translation strategy, of the
translator’s effort to insure easy readability by adhering to current usage, main-
taining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning” (Venuti 2008, 1). Again, it
must be stressed that the transparency effect does not preclude, rather it increases
at times, a degree of intervention in the foreign texts.
The option for fluency conforms to both the philosophy and the metadis-
course of the collection, voiced at regular intervals by the general editor, Gentil
Marques, in small but gushing prefaces or introductions to the translations on
the merits of the “eternal” authors. The surprisingly stable group of translators
in the collection must have been briefed as to the ultimate goals of the collec-
tion, as they tend to perform coherently, without fissures; although, of course,
it should be noted that the domesticating strategy corresponded to the dominant
perception of translation at the time. Mário Domingues does not seem to stand
out as far as translatorial strategies are concerned, but he is one of the most
frequent translators in the collection, along with Leyguarda Ferreira. There is,
however, one of his translations that merits further attention here. It is the most
singular case of Charles Dickens’s Edwin Drood, which Domingues translates
and completes.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood was left incomplete by Charles Dickens, as the
author collapsed in 1870 in the middle of the publication of the novel in monthly
parts. Six parts had been issued from a project intended to be completed in twelve.
Thus, editing and publishing the novel is a topic deserving closer attention, for
every editorial project of Edwin Drood may be said to involve interpretive deci-
sions not unfamiliar to the translator. Translating the novel into other languages
may compound the unfinished character of the novel. This may prove particularly
complex when the translation is to be part of a collection, such as the one I have
been discussing, a collection that eschews any hint of experimentalism, as the
editor acknowledges a civilizing purpose: “nowadays reading is no longer a whim
or a simple pastime, it rather constitutes an object of culture, a source of wisdom,
spiritual food. Books are conquering a worthy position among the vital needs of
any civilized people” (Marques 1961, 5).
Therefore, it was inconceivable to publish the text in its incompleteness.8 A
novel had to have well-defined borders. An experienced translator, who was an
author as well, was asked to complete it. The book was presented as a novel by
Charles Dickens, and the average reader would have read it as such. There are
only two moments when the “counterfeit” was made explicit. On the colophon
there is an inscription that reads: “Complete Translation and Conclusion by Mário
Domingues.” No further information is provided except at the end, where one
finds a “Final Note.” Written in the first-person singular, the note by the self-
proclaimed “humble Portuguese translator” (Dickens 1958, 443) contextualizes
 Invisible man 75
the novel’s circumstances and informs the reader that his is just one among many
efforts to complete the novel. However, the effort is presented as an imperti-
nence, justified only by the need to “diminish as much as possible the feeling of
desolation that an unfinished novel leaves in us” (Dickens 1958, 443). Thus the
translator, “who dared to collaborate with the great English novelist, hopes that
the reader, while condemning his natural shortcomings, will take into considera-
tion the good will shown by the former who had only one wish: to serve the reader
the best he could” (Dickens 1958, 443).
It is my conviction that we are witnessing two divergent strategies here, which
highlight the whole collection’s purpose. On the one hand, Domingues and the
publisher are jointly creating what I would like to call a “pseudoauthorship.”
A book is marketed and sold as a novel by Charles Dickens, bearing only tiny
traces—strategically placed—of the second authorship. The average reader of the
collection would have paid little or no attention to the paratextual geography. Thus
the translator is vying with the author for the authorship of the book, despite his
rhetorical claims of humbleness. Indeed, the last third of the novel—147 pages,
to be exact—was entirely penned by Domingues, a fact which leaves no explicit
trace on the text itself.
On the other hand, the very boldness of this act of pseudoauthorship makes it
possible to preserve the “wholeness” of the novel, as, on the one hand, the illusion
of authorship remains unshattered—Charles Dickens’s authority is never openly
challenged, and, on the other, discourse inside the text is apparently univocal—
the reader rarely has to listen to a dissonant voice, as there are but four unsigned
footnotes. Transparency is never forfeited. The novel reads well in Portuguese
from beginning to end.
It is and it is not Dickens, of course. This is clearly seen in the treatment of
the chapter titles. While the translator does not go astray with the titles, the inter-
pretation offered to the reader is at times markedly different. Also different is the
narrator’s prevailing attitude towards foreignness in the Portuguese text. Foreign
characters are viewed with a greater suspicion in the Portuguese text, and their
alterity is thematized and scrutinized in no uncertain terms. In the latter part of the
novel, penned by Domingues, Ceylon, the country of origin of Neville Landless
and his sister, becomes India, and India is described as a “mysterious country”
with “terrible ways,” (Dickens 1958, 314) where “murder is cultivated as a reli-
gious ritual,” for instance (Dickens 1958, 315).9
Missing too are to some extent the narrator’s irony and some intertextual
references—others are changed: for instance, “bean-stalk country” (Dickens
1958, chapter 22) becomes “País das Maravilhas” [“Wonderland”]—as well as a
handful of observations proffered by the narrator or the characters. One example
must suffice here:

The Minor Canon answered: “Your late guardian is a—a most unreason-
able person, and it signifies nothing to any reasonable person whether he is
adverse or perverse, or the reverse.”
(Dickens 2002, 195)
76 Alexandra Lopes
O seu antigo tutor é . . . um ser extremamente limitado, e o que ele é não deve
ter importância alguma para as pessoas razoáveis.
(Dickens 1958, 211)

Your old guardian is . . . an extremely limited person, and what he is should

be of no consequence at all to reasonable people.
(My back translation)

Overall, it could be said that the narrative voice is much more solemn, much less
critical in Portuguese than in English, in accordance with the image of authorship
and authority the collection is striving for. These are, after all, “eternal texts” by
“eternal authors.”
The translation of Edwin Drood epitomizes to some extent the trajectory of
Mário Domingues in the Portuguese republic of letters. On the one hand, the
translated text submits wilfully to the collection’s philosophy—it is a “qui-
escent translation” (Venuti 2013, 152). On the surface, it does not question
and/or resist either the source text’s incompleteness or the contingencies of a
popular readership. On the other, though, the translated text is transgressive
of authority, as it occupies unabashedly the empty void of the dead author. In
a sense, it shares the Barthesian principle that “[t]o give a text an Author is
to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the
writing” (Barthes 1977, 147). By completing the novel, Domingues is actually
re-placing the text into a new constellation, moving it into different realms
of reading experience, and effectively dethroning the author and usurping his
place. The mischievousness of pseudonymity finds resonance in the act of
dethronement—it is as if both gestures highlight the continuous interplay of
authorship and translatorship, that is, the plurality and partiality of a pervading
translatedness. Developed in and from the margins—the outskirts of Lisbon
translate geographically the peripheralization of his public persona from the
1930s onwards—Mário Domingues’s was a discreet revolution, one that still
awaits researchers to release its full potential.

Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Bloomsbury Publishing Plc for the permission to use
Stuart Hall’s quote on page 68: © Stuart Hall, 1997, ‘Minimal Selves’, Studying
Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. by Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan,
Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Notes
1 The reasons for this are still somewhat unclear, although there is no shortage of motives
in the available literature. In a brief bio-note in the Arquivo Histórico-Social/Projeto
MOSCA, one reads: “Com o 28 de Maio de 1926 foi envolvido pela comercialização
do jornalismo e voltou-se para a história, escrevendo mais de uma dezena de volumes. . . .
Viveu do que escrevia e esse facto, somando aos seus complexos de cor, levaram-no
 Invisible man 77
a abusar da bebida e a cometer erros dentro do movimento libertário” (http://mosca-
servidor.xdi.uevora.pt/arquivo/index.php?p=creators/creator&id=304)/“After May 28,
1926, he saw himself engulfed by the commodification of journalism, and turned to
history, writing more than one dozen volumes. . . . He earned his living writing, and
this fact, together with his race complex, led him to excessive drinking and to making
mistakes within the libertarian movement.”
2 “The stranger will thus not be considered here in the usual sense of the term, as the
wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the man who comes today
and stays tomorrow—the potential wanderer, so to speak, who, although he has gone
no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within
a certain spatial circle—or within a group whose boundaries are analogous to spatial
boundaries—but his position within it is fundamentally affected by the fact that he does
not belong in it initially and that he brings qualities into it that are not, cannot be, indig-
enous to it” (Simmel 143).
3 Four years prior to the publication of O menino entre gigantes, Sam Selvon had pub-
lished his groundbreaking novel The Lonely Londoners. In it one finds the following
invective: “Colour, it is you that causing all this, you know. Why the hell you can’t be
blue, or red or green, if you can’t be white? You know is you that cause a lot of misery
in the world. Is not me, you know, is you! Look at you, you so black and innocent, and
this time you causing misery all over the world!” (Selvon 2006, 77).
4 This interpretation cannot, and should not, cancel the obvious fact that this pseudonym-
ity is applied only to genres that were considered minor at the time. However, while
this evidence is undeniable, it does not explain why pseudonymity becomes polypseud-
onymity in ever more imbricated levels: a fictitious translator rendering the work of a
fictitious author.
5 This passage finds its echo in O menino entre os gigantes: “[Adelina] Fingia sempre
esquecer o meu nome para aludir à minha cor./- Anda cá, pretinho! . . . Parece que a
Adelina andava a espalhar por toda a parte que a minha mãe era preta. Um dia, a Belmira
foi buscar-me como de costume. . . . [Um condiscípulo] Reconhecendo-me, deixou os
companheiros e correu ao meu encontro. Eu sorri-lhe, com simpatia. Mas ele, com um
riso trocista na cara suja, gritou-me, quase à queima-roupa:/- Eh, preto da China! . . .
Eh, preto! . . .” (Domingues 1960, 170–171) // “[Adelina] always pretended she had
forgotten my name, in order to refer to my skin colour./- Come here, little black boy! . . .
It transpired that Adelina had been spreading the news that my mother was black. One
day, Belmira came to pick me up, as usual. . . . [A school mate] Recognizing me, left
his fellow players behind and approached me. I smiled at him, in a friendly way. But
he smirked and yelled at me, almost at close range: - Hey, nigger all the way from
Chine!. . . Hey, nigger!. . . .”
This coincidence showcases common discursive practices in the West, as well as
the ensuing commonality of experience. Non-whiteness was generally painted with a
very broad brush—classified and objectified as inferior, that is, fixidity in the eyes of
the beholder translated into a never-ending mobility as the experience of the perpetual
stranger.
6 I have “imported” Theo Hermans’s concept of “authentication” into my argumentation
(2007, 18–25), although I use it in a loose fashion. As I understand it in the context of
this collection, authentication is a mode of reading the novels and its translations, which
favors one exclusive interpretation with view to produce a definitive understanding of
“great” literature.
7 Again the relations of Mário Domingues to the publisher João Romano Torres are well
worth in-depth research, as Domingues has translated many a volume for this now
extinct publishing house, as well as published his collection of “historical evocations”
there. Romano Torres’ online archive can be accessed at the site of the Universidade
Nova de Lisbon: http://fcsh.unl.pt/chc/romanotorres/.
78 Alexandra Lopes
8 It is intriguing why the novel was published in the context of this collection, but this is a
line of enquiry that may well end in a cul-de-sac, as documentation is rather scarce. One
argument that may help explaining the publication is the fact that the collection included
almost every other major Dickensian novel.
9 This, again, conforms to the general purposes of the collection, catering for the unso-
phisticated views of its readership. However, the gesture could perhaps be productively
discussed in psychoanalytical terms, as a kind of unconscious intellectual impulse for
“denegrification.”

References
Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. London: Cambridge University Press, 1932. Print.
Arquivo Histórico-Social/Projecto MOSCA. Web. 20 Sep 2015.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image Music Text. Trans. and ed. Stephen
Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977. 142–8. Print.
Boethius. Theological Tractates. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. H. F. Stewart,
E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. Print.
Coetzee, J.M. Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life. New York: Viking, 1997. Print.
Dantas, Luís. Mário Domingues, n.d., n.p.: n.e. Web. 2 Jan 2016.
Dickens, Charles. O mistério de Edwin Drood. Trans. Mário Domingues. Lisbon: Romano
Torres, 1958. Print.
Dickens, Charles. The Mystery of Edwin Drood. London and New York: Penguin Books,
2002. Print.
Domingues, Mário. “Cousas de estarrecer. O formoso jardim.”A Batalha, 23 March 1921.
–––. “O jornalista vagabundo que passou 8 dias e 8 noites sem dinheiro.” O Notícias
Ilustrado, ano III, série II, No. 93, 23 Mar 1930. Web. 15 Jan 2016.
–––. O menino entre gigantes, Lisbon: Prelo, 1960. Print.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto
Press, 2008. Print.
Garcia, José Luís. “Um mulato contra o império português. Descobrir Mário Domingues
no século XXI.” Estado, Regimes e Revoluções. Estudos em homenagem a Manuel de
Lucena Eds. Carlos Gaspar, Fátima Patriarca, Salgado de Matos. Lisboa: Instituto de
Ciências Sociais, 2012. 457–83. Print.
Genette, Gerard. Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge,
New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “Minimal selves.” Studying Culture. An Introductory Reader. Ed. Ann Gray
and Jim McGuigan. London, New York, Sydney and Auckland: Arnold, 1997. 134–8.
Print.
Hermans, Theo. The Conference of Tongues. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2007.
Print.
Marques, Gentil. “Breve nota de introdução.” Jane Austen. Sangue Azul. Trans. Leyguarda
Ferreira. Lisboa: Romano Torres, 1961. 5–8. Print.
Moniz, Maria Lin. “A case of pseudotranslation in the Portuguese literary system.” Estudos
de tradução em Portugal. A Colecção Livros RTP Biblioteca Básica Verbo—II. Ed.
Teresa Seruya. Lisbon: Universidade Católica Editora, 2007. 200–9. Print.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. Essays and criticism 1981-1991. London:
Vintage Books, 2010. Print.
–––. Joseph Anton. A Memoir. London: Vintage, 2013. Print.
 Invisible man 79
Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. London, New York, Toronto: Penguin Books, 2006.
Print.
Simmel, Georg. “The Stranger.” On Individuality and Social Forms. Selected Writings.
Ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1971.
143–9. Print.
Sontag, Susan. “On being translated.” Where the Stress Falls. Essays. London: Vintage,
2003. 334–47. Print.
–––. “The World as India. The St. Jerome Lecture on Literary Translation.” At the Same
Time. Essays and Speeches. Ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump. London et al.:
Hamish Hamilton, 2007. 156–79. Print.
Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Rev. ed. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2012. Print. 23 Sep 12.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility. 2nd rev. ed. London and New York:
Routledge, 2008. Print.
–––. “Translation, Community, Utopia.” Translation Changes Rverything. Theory and
Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. 11–31. Print.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Complete works of Oscar Wilde. London and
Glasgow: Collins, 1966. 17–167. Print.
5 Pseudotranslation from
Blackwood’s to Carlyle
Dousterswivel, von Lauerwinkel,
Teufelsdröckh
Tom Toremans

In a recent entry in the State of the Discipline Report of the American Comparative
Literature Association (ACLA), Brigitte Rath delivered a strong plea for the disci-
pline to reckon with pseudotranslation as one of the “Ideas of the Decade” (Rath
2014). Indicating that the term only fairly recently arrived on the scene of literary
criticism, and that it still suffers somewhat from a lack of terminological stability
(it competes with terms such as “fictitious translation,” “supposed translation,”
and “original translation”), Rath firmly establishes the term as relevant for the
study of (world) literature today:

Foregrounding a text’s imaginary origin in a different culture . . . stresses the

conjecture and transnational imagination that is always involved in reading a
text as world literature. Pseudotranslation as a mode of reading has also much
to contribute to questions of translatability, representation, voice, authorship,
authenticity, and multilingualism.
(Rath 2014, n.p.)

Pseudotranslations are as old as literature itself, with notable examples such as

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136, presented as a
Latin translation of “a very ancient book in the British tongue” (2)), Miguel de
Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605/1615, claimed to be a translation of an Arabic
manuscript by Cide Hamete Benengeli), and Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes
(1721, presented as translations of letters by two Persian noblemen traveling
through France). Rath indicates that the phenomenon has attracted quite some
critical attention in the last decade and that a “new field” is emerging that has in
the meantime “reached a tipping point” (Rath 2014, n.p.). At the same time, how-
ever, this field suffers from “a scarcity of cross-references between the individual
contributions” and “little awareness for the developing field” (Rath 2014, n.p.).
Both Rath’s plea for scholarly recognition of pseudotranslation and her call
for a more systematic study of the phenomenon should be situated in the wake
of the publication of a number of studies that have put the phenomenon on the
map of both Translation Studies and literary scholarship. Such studies display a
wide variety of approaches, ranging from Emily Apter’s Benjaminian take on
pseudotranslation as “the premier illustration of a deconstructed ontology, insofar
 Dousterswivel, von Lauerwinkel, and Teufelsdröckh 81
as it reveals the extent to which all translations are unreliable transmitters of the
original” (Apter 2005, 212) to Ronald Jenn’s (2013) more descriptive analysis
of nineteenth-century American pseudotranslations by Irving, Hawthorne, and
Twain from a postcolonialist angle. By far, most of the contributions to the field
are case studies focusing on the production of pseudotranslations in, for exam-
ple, French (Martens and Vanacker 2013), English (Rath 2014, Du Pont 2005),
German (Jenn 2013, de Groote and Toremans 2014), Turkish (Gürçağlar 2010),
and Japanese (Beebee and Amano 2010).1 Such (collections of) case studies have
highlighted functions and objectives of the practice of pseudotranslation, its
essentially parasitic constitution, and its place in literary systems and in processes
of cross-cultural transfer between such systems.
That pseudotranslation is a phenomenon of interest both to Translation Studies
and literary scholarship, is indicated by a comparison of two entries in a handbook
and an encyclopedia of Translation Studies, respectively. In the 1998 Routledge
Encyclopedia of Translation Studies Douglas Robinson considers pseudotransla-
tion from a predominantly literary historical point of view, claiming that “the
parasitic concept of pseudotranslation” reveals “the extent to which our copyright
law, which distinguishes so clearly between translations and original works, trans-
lators and authors, is a social fiction of relatively recent venue” (Robinson 1998,
185). Quoting Anton Popovič’s definition of “fictitious translation” as “the so-
called quasi-metatext, i.e. the text that is to be accepted as a metatext,” Robinson
emphasizes that pseudotranslations should not just be approached from a purely
textual or production angle, but also as works “whose status as ‘original’ or ‘deriv-
ative’ is, for whatever social or textual reason, problematic” (Robinson 1998,
183). Referring to Cervantes, Robinson also draws attention to the particular form
of pseudotranslation that presents itself as the “deliberately transparent extension
of the ‘found manuscript’ conceit” (Robinson 1998, 184), thus foregrounding the
close relation between pseudotranslations and the genre of the novel, which wit-
nessed a proliferation of fictional devices to ground fiction in reality and play with
degrees of authenticity (such as the epistolary form, the first-person account, etc.).
Some thirteen years later, Carol O’Sullivan approached the phenomenon
from a slightly different angle, starting her entry in the Handbook of Translation
Studies with the observation that “pseudotranslations constitute an attractive
object of study for Descriptive Translation Studies-oriented research and research
grounded in Polysystem Theory.” O’Sullivan further added that pseudotransla-
tions “extend beyond literary innovation or forgery” and allow for “explorations
of style and norms,” a way “of adopting an alternative writing voice,” “supply
a space for play,” or, finally, may “constitute a narrative strategy for fiction”
(O’Sullivan 2011, n.p.).
That pseudotranslation invites, even necessitates, a combination of Descriptive
Translation Studies and literary scholarship becomes all the more apparent when
we study the phenomenon in the context of British Romanticism. Given the
close proximity of pseudotranslation to issues such as textual authenticity, autho-
rial identity, genre, and literary innovation, it should come as no surprise that
the Romantic period was particularly productive in pseudotranslations. In fact,
82 Tom Toremans
as Jenn (2013) has noted, the term was first coined in Britain in 1823, in an anony-
mous review in The Literary Gazette of Walladmor, a German novel launched at
the Leipzig book fair of that year as a German translation of the latest novel by
Walter Scott. As Margaret Russett has elaborately argued, hoaxes and impostures
were an essential part of the forging of Romantic authenticity as they “helped to
define the frontiers of literary discourse during the period in which ‘literature’
assumed its modern disciplinary meaning” (Russett 2006, 4). As factors contrib-
uting to the proliferation of hoaxes, impostures, and forgeries during this period,
Russett lists:

the literal and figurative mobility achieved through international trade and
colonial expansion; the rise of ethnographic discourse consequent on increas-
ing contact with non-Anglophone cultures both within and without the British
Isles; the dramatic material transformations of the literary market; the accom-
panying revaluation of the vernacular canon; and the new model of person-
hood associated . . . with the development of a credit economy.
(Russett 2006, 4)

Whereas Russett’s study focuses on fakes, plagiarism, and imposture, the phe-
nomenon of pseudotranslation has as yet remained somewhat under the critical
radar of Romantic scholarship. Texts such as Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translation
of the Letters from a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Charles Fox’s fictitious translation of
poems by the “Persian exile” Ahmad Ardebili (1797, advertised in the first edition
of the Lyrical Ballads), Robert Southey’s Letters from England (1807), and John
Galt’s Andrew of Padua (1820) have been analyzed from a variety of angles,2 yet
they have not yet been studied as constitutive of the subgenre (if that is indeed
what it is) of Romantic pseudotranslation.
A more systematic study of this subgenre would certainly benefit from a
descriptive approach such as the one suggested on several occasions by Gideon
Toury. Toury devoted an “excursus” on the topic of pseudotranslation in his
seminal Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, describing it as a strategy
offering “a convenient and relatively safe way of breaking with sanctioned pat-
terns and introducing novelties into a culture”:

[g]iven the fact that translations tend to be assigned secondary functions

within a cultural (poly)system . . . , there can be no wonder that deviations
occurring in texts assumed to have been translated often meet with greater
tolerance, and for this very reason.
(Toury 2012, 48–9)

Referring to The Book of Mormon, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, and Karen

Blixen’s Gengældelsens Veje, Toury argues that “the decision to disguise a text as
a translation always implies a deliberate act of subordination, namely to a culture
which is considered prestigious, important, or dominant in some way” (Toury
2012, 50). Both as a process and as a product, pseudotranslations are “proper
 Dousterswivel, von Lauerwinkel, and Teufelsdröckh 83
objects of study” for Descriptive Translation Studies, since they are sources of the
translation norms prevailing in a certain society and “testify to what a society has
become conscious of in how it conceives of translation” (Toury 2012, 54).
This descriptive approach of pseudotranslation as “a disguise mechanism
whereby advantage is taken of a culture-internal conception of translation” (Toury
2005, 5) is certainly relevant for the study of Romantic instances of the phenom-
enon. Take, for example, Robert Southey’s Letters from England: By Don Manuel
Alvarez Espriella, first published in 1807, and presented as a translation of a
series of letters by a Spanish Don travelling through England. As Carol Bolton
has recently argued, Southey “adopts the detached perspective of an outsider from
which to critique his own society” (Bolton 2012, 3), which allows him to “evince
his graphic, physical disgust without seeming disloyal or alarmist in the way that
an English commentator would” (Bolton 2012, 6). Apart from this critical func-
tion, Southey’s pseudotranslation also presents an instance of generic innovation
as it “combines factual accounts with fictional characters, on-the-spot reportage
with prescient predictions of society’s progression, and an epistolary novel with a
travel narrative” (Bolton 2012, 5). It would have to be further determined, moreo-
ver, how Southey’s Letters relate to translations (of travel accounts as well as of
other texts) within the cultural system of the time. At the same time, however, the
Letters emphatically do not imply an act of cultural subordination, and the fact
Southey precisely uses a culture that he considered inferior to that of Britain sub-
stantially enhances the critical impact of Espriella’s observations:

Southey opposes capitalist models of production that use labor at the lowest
expense for the highest profit, but ignore the great human cost in the process.
To do so he uses the voice of a fellow European, from a nation he considered
retrogressive in its domination by the church, and feudal in its social struc-
tures, but nevertheless showed greater concern for the welfare of the poor
than his own.
(Bolton 2012, 3)

As Bolton convincingly demonstrates, it is precisely the intricately ambivalent

position adopted by Southey that turns the Letters into such “uncomfortable, de-
familiarising reading for the English” (Bolton 2012, 13). While on the one hand
the strategy of pseudotranslation allows Southey to combine the genres of fact and
fiction and to indirectly voice incisive social criticism on an increasingly mate-
rialist British culture, he does so precisely by using a narrator who stems from
a culture that he considers inferior because of its feudal social structures and its
domination by the Catholic Church. Such intricacies only come to light through
a careful analysis of the literary historical context in which the pseudotranslation
was produced—in this case Southey’s own evolution from youthful radical to
Tory reactionary and the ideologically complex position he occupied at the time
of writing the Letters.
Another interesting instance of Romantic pseudotranslation is the publica-
tion in Berlin in 1823 of Walladmor: Frei nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott,
84 Tom Toremans
von W****s, with two additional volumes published in 1824. Without discussing
this case in detail,3 it is interesting to indicate in this context that this fictitious
translation of the newest novel by Walter Scott was strategically published just
in time for the Leipzig book fair, which had no new Scott novel on offer yet.
A detailed analysis of this commercial strategy, the paratextual presentation of
the translation, and its production would indeed yield an interesting view on the
systemic position, not only of translation, but also of Scott’s historical novels
in contemporary German culture (and in broader European culture, as the pseu-
dotranslation was in turn translated into French, Dutch, Polish, Swedish, and
English). Yet, in order to more fully address the literary historical value of the
work, such a descriptive analysis should be supplemented with an analysis of
its use of pseudotranslation as an ironic strategy in its own right. When in the
third and final volume the mysterious Thomas Malburne (who has been haunt-
ing the novel’s protagonist, Bertram) reveals himself as Sir Walter Scott, this
revelation effects a mise-en-abyme of sorts. It metafictionally allegorizes the pro-
cess of pseudotranslation: a fictitious Walter Scott (re)claims authorship of the
novel in question from Bertram, who is writing a novel in the style of Walladmor.
Importantly, this metafictional ironic performance does not import a foreign
literary strategy into the German literary system. On the contrary, as Frederick
Burwick (1994) and Lionel Thomas (1951) have argued on different occasions,
Walladmor’s metafictional irony is German rather than British (as De Quincey
will indirectly demonstrate by effacing these ironic versions in his “retranslation”
into English). Walladmor is thus at the same time strongly embedded in the lit-
erary culture of the time (profiting from the popularity and mass production of
translations of Scott novels) and a literary experiment in its own right (allegoriz-
ing its own status as pseudotranslation by incorporating Scott’s metafictional play
with authorship in its own narrative structure and blending it with the disruptive
effects of German Romantic irony).
Interestingly, Walter Scott himself responded to Walladmor in the preface to
The Betrothed (1825) by means of extending his own metafictional play with
fictitious editors. The preface presents the minutes of “a general meeting of the
shareholders designing to form a joint-stock company, united for the purpose
of writing and publishing the class of works called the Waverley novels” (Scott
1832, 16). Under the chairmanship of the “Eidolon, or image of the author,”
a series of fictional editors/characters from earlier Waverley novels (such
as Templeton, Oldbuck, Dryasdust, and Clutterbuck) assemble to discuss the
production of Waverley novels through “a little mechanism” (Scott 1832, 21)
designed to mechanically weave works of historical fiction, making the author
obsolete. The Rev. Mr. Templeton—familiar from the “Dedicatory Letter” pref-
acing Ivanhoe—suggests as an exemplary instance of such mechanical book
production a novel called Walladmor and insinuates that it was probably written
by Herman Dousterswivel, known by Scott’s readers as the German swindler in
The Antiquary. Scott thus inscribes Walladmor in his own metafictional experi-
ments with authorship and authenticity in the first Waverley novels. As Margaret
Russett has argued, it was this metafictional practice that led to a proliferation
 Dousterswivel, von Lauerwinkel, and Teufelsdröckh 85
of fakes, forgeries, and hoaxes in Scottish Romantic literary culture. Already in
the eighteenth century a “legacy of imposture” (Russett 2006, 155) had haunted
the Scottish Enlightenment, with the publication of fake histories and literary
forgeries such as Elizabeth Halkett’s “Hardyknute” and Macpherson’s Ossian.
This play with authorial identity and textual authenticity only gained momen-
tum, however, in the wake of Walter Scott’s earliest publications in the first
decades of the nineteenth century. As Russett explains, a “Caledonian forgery
narrative” (Russett 2006, 156) runs from Scott’s mystifications of his authorship
to experiments with pseudonymity in Blackwood’s Magazine to James Hogg’s
tales of forgery in The Queen’s Wake and The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner. It is in the margins of this proliferation of forgeries and
impostures that we should situate the experiments with pseudotranslation in late-
Romantic Scottish writing.
A most direct link between the pseudotranslational practice in late-Romantic
Scottish periodicals and Scott’s metafictional play is provided by the resurfacing
of Dousterswivel’s name (although this time we are dealing with Jacob instead
of Herman) as the author of a book entitled Inquiry into the Theory of Imposture,
reviewed in the June issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1822.
Translating fragments of this fictitious philosophical work, the review discusses
a work on the theme of (literary) imposture in the form of a pseudotranslational
hoax. From a descriptive point of view, the review should be situated in the
larger context of the British late-Romantic engagement with German literature
and philosophy, which found a particularly receptive outlet in Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine. While its Whig rival, the Edinburgh Review, tended to
focus on French literature, the international scope of Blackwood’s (est. 1817) was
considerably broader and contained translations from a variety of languages seri-
ally published as “Horae.” Next to the “Horae Scandicae,” “Horae Hispanicae,”
and “Horae Cambricae,” it was the “Horae Germanicae” that was the most
prominent in these series, with translations (mainly by John Gibson Lockhart
and Robert Pearse Gillies) of drama by Adolphus Müllner, Franz Grillparzer,
Theodor Körner, and Ernst Raupach, fiction by the Baron and Baroness de la
Motte Fouqué, and the first English translation (by John Anster) of a substantial
part of Goethe’s Faust in 1820.4 In the margins of this translational activity, a
number of contributions were included between 1818 and 1822 that presented
themselves as translations of original German texts, but were original composi-
tions by Blackwood’s editors and authors such as John Wilson, John Lockhart,
and Robert Gillies, who in these essays introduced fictitious authors such as
Baron von Lauerwinkel, Philip Kempferhausen, Ulrich Sternstare, and Jacob
Dousterswivel. Apart from its close proximity to actual translations of German
texts, this pseudotranslational activity should also be situated in the broader con-
text of Blackwood’s scandalizing and Scott-inspired experiment with the use of
pseudonyms and fictional authors and editors, including Christopher North, The
Odontist, Peter Morris, William Wastle, Timothy Tickler, the Ettrick Shepherd
(James Hogg), Giles Middlestitch, Dr. Olinthus Petre, and many others. While
this metafictional practice of Blackwood’s has been well documented, what has
86 Tom Toremans
remained somewhat obscured in this critical scholarship is the observation that
it presents us with ironic instances of cross-cultural exchange with German cul-
ture and as such it tells us something about the functions and substance of such
exchanges.
As indicated in a footnote, Dousterswivel’s book was published as Theorie der
Betrug by the publisher Nichtsagen in Leipzig and Frankfurt in May 1822. Praising
Dousterswivel as “the first metaphysician of the age” (Lockhart 1822, 682), the
reviewer, John Lockhart, alternates between commentary and direct quotations
(which are in fact pseudotranslations). Dousterswivel’s book presents us with an
ironic mise-en-abyme of sorts: we are presented with a theory of imposture com-
posed by a fictional author who is himself a striking instance of imposture. Moreover,
Dousterswivel’s book verges on the incomprehensible or the nonsensical as a result
of its overwrought use of metaphor. As Christopher Scalia has recently remarked,
the mock review “has escaped scholarly attention despite the recent emergence
of critical interest in Blackwood’s” (Scalia 2012, 381–2) and it actually effects an
ironic defense of Blackwood’s scandalous and unorthodox style. Dousterswivel’s
theory of imposture, Scalia argues, “aptly expresses the purpose behind the
magazine’s jesting, which is to shatter hypocrisy and unmask dangerous imposture”:

Because the Dousterswivel hoax is both a defense and a parody, alternating

between an incomprehensible philosophy of imposture and a cogent analysis
of ridicule and jesting, it performs precisely as Dousterswivel claims ridicule
and joking should: it demands that readers stay alert to tonal variations, to
recognize the many forms within itself.
(Scalia 2012, 385–6)

Convincingly arguing for the recognition of “the relevance of Blackwood’s to

European literary culture” (Scalia 2012, 392), Scalia relates this critical gesture to
the Schlegelian version of Romantic irony, thus suggesting that the review func-
tioned as a vehicle for the import of a foreign stylistic element.
Interestingly, the superiority of the culture from which this element was
imported was posited in another pseudotranslation by Lockhart in an earlier issue
of Blackwood’s; in the March issue of 1818, the reader found “Remarks on the
Periodical Criticism of England—In a Letter to a Friend. (Translated from the
German of Von Lauerwinkel).” Scholarship has in the meantime established
that the letter was written by Lockhart, who takes on the pseudonym of Baron
von Lauerwinkel to criticize the rival periodicals The Quarterly Review and
The Edinburgh Review and their respective editors, William Gifford and Francis
Jeffrey. A year before the publication of the letter, Lockhart had visited Goethe at
Weimar and started planning his translation of Friedrich von Schlegel’s Lectures
on the History of Literature (eventually published in 1838). He had also read
Schiller’s plays and admired Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s
Die Elixiere des Teufels. Although Lockhart will later prefer Herder to Schlegel, it
is the latter who still furnishes Lockhart with the exemplary German critic when
von Lauerwinkel’s letter is published.5
 Dousterswivel, von Lauerwinkel, and Teufelsdröckh 87
Lockhart’s use of fictitious translation in this review allows him to be elabo-
rately and openly critical of contemporaneous British periodical culture while
establishing the cultural superiority of German criticism. The letter’s authenticity
is ingeniously established: in a footnote to the title, it is explained that:

[w]hen we announced this letter some months ago, we mentioned it as the

composition of a certain celebrated German critic. We delayed its publica-
tion in consequence of some suspicions we entertained as to that point, and
have since learned from the translator that the author is not the writer we had
named, but his friend, the Baron Von Lauerwinkel.
(“Remarks” 1818, 670)

The “Notices of the Editor” of the October 1817 issue indeed announced “A
Dissertation on the ‘Periodical Criticism’ of Great Britain, translated from the
German of Schlegel” (681). The repeated references in the letter to the addressee’s
knowledge of English literature and his friendship with Goethe (who is identified
as “the privy councilor” in another footnote by the Editor) seem to suggest that it is
actually addressed to Schlegel. A reference in the opening section to “my last letter”
(“Remarks” 1818, 670) (which apparently did not satisfy the addressee) also implies
that the letter is part of an ongoing correspondence between von Lauerwinkel and
Schlegel on British literary and periodical culture. This is important, since it indi-
cates that the letter was not primarily intended for a British readership and that the
reader is presented with a translated specimen of a German exchange on British
periodical culture that was not meant to be a direct intervention in the British
intellectual debate of the time. The letter’s authenticity is further suggested by the
observation that von Lauerwinkel’s acquaintance with British literature and culture
derives from his stay in London on business where, as he remarks, “the great men
who I saw were not the great men of literature” (“Remarks” 1818, 670).
The main objective of Lockhart’s pseudotranslation is to create this cross-
cultural constellation so that he can strategically position Blackwood’s in the
periodical landscape of its time and be openly critical of its rival periodicals.
Critics such as Kim Wheatley (1999) and David Higgins (2005) have carefully
charted the positions taken by von Lauerwinkel: although harshly criticizing both
journals for their dictatorial abuse of literary authors, the letter politically sides
with the Toryism of The Quarterly Review while strongly condemning the Whig
politics of the Edinburgh Review. As Kim Wheatley has claimed, Lockhart “over-
states the differences between the Quarterly and the Edinburgh and inflates the
power of the Edinburgh to imply that the Tories are on the defensive” (Wheatley
1999, 17). Higgins similarly claims about Lockhart’s article that it was

the first of a number of attempts by [Blackwood’s] writers to suggest that it

was a new type of journal. It was important for the magazine to differentiate
itself from the Quarterly as well as the Edinburgh, even though Blackwood’s
was on the same side as the former in terms of politics.
(Higgins 2005, 18)
88 Tom Toremans
Importantly, this strategic positioning of Blackwood’s takes place in the broader
context of an ideological conflict that is essentially transnational and European
in scope: the struggle between both periodicals is presented as a local (and “pro-
vincial” (674)) symptom of a pan-European and even universal moral conflict.
This transnational gesture centers on the figure of Shakespeare, who is lifted
out of the national culture of England, hopelessly in decline, and is inscribed
in a European history and tradition of literary genius. It is this juxtaposition of
German insight and English blindness that structures von Lauerwinkel’s exposi-
tion. In a first movement, he offsets German and English reviewing culture: while
a German reviewer is “a plain, sensible, sober professor, doctor, or master of arts”
(“Remarks” 1818, 671) who judges the literary work according to its own merits,
English reviewers are “political zealots” who use the text under review as a mere
pretext to extoll their own political views and reduce the author to “a mere pup-
pet” (“Remarks” 1818, 671). As such, English reviewers are far removed from
the ideal reviewer, who would judge like Shakespeare: “universal—impartial—
rational” (“Remarks” 1818, 672). Indicating that “we have never had any thing
like either of them in Germany” (“Remarks” 1818, 672), von Lauerwinkel subse-
quently elaborates on the respective editors of the Quarterly and the Edinburgh:
while Gifford is “merely a critic and a satirist” (“Remarks” 1818, 672) and “a
mighty bigot” (“Remarks” 1818, 673) ignorant of Napoleon’s genius (albeit an
evil genius), Jeffrey is staged as “a disciple of Hume” and the “would-be philoso-
phers of the French school,” and his periodical as “the apologist of Napoleon”
(“Remarks” 1818, 677). Both periodicals and editors, von Lauerwinkel suggests,
are part of a morally impoverished culture that “we Germans” (“Remarks” 1818,
673) find hard to comprehend and that contrasts poorly with a Europe that “is of
one mind” and in which “the right cause has triumphed” (“Remarks” 1818, 677).
The letter ends in a clear-cut hierarchy that relegates Gifford and Jeffrey to the
status of insignificant footnotes in European intellectual history:

It is true that Homer and Shakespeare made no critical prefaces. But is it

possible to believe, that these men were ignorant of any thing worth know-
ing respecting their own art, which a Gifford, a Jeffray [sic], or even, to take
much higher men, which a Lessing or a Herder could have taught them?
(“Remarks” 1818, 679)

From Homer and Shakespeare to the great German critics and ultimately to insig-
nificant British reviewers, von Lauerwinkel paints for his reader a picture of a
culture in decline and in dire need of moral regeneration, concluding with the hope
that the English may soon recover from “the state of contented ignorance and con-
ceit, into which they have been brought by the ministrations of their Reviewers”
(“Remarks” 1818, 679). Formulated by a fictitious foreign critic, this cultural
hierarchy in turn legitimizes his criticism of British periodical culture. Both the
cross-cultural transfer in the letter and its creation as a fiction are essential to its
strategic preparation of ground for the emergence of Blackwood’s as superior
vehicle of a transnational culture. Lockhart’s pseudotranslation effects a gesture
 Dousterswivel, von Lauerwinkel, and Teufelsdröckh 89
that is at once ironic and incisively critical, thereby establishing authority in its
very construction of inauthenticity. As such, pseudotranslation in its periodical
guise, is a performative gesture rather than mere play or mystification. It radically
challenges notions such as authorial and national identity and fully exploits the
possibilities of the medium of the periodical to construct its own critical universe
precisely with the aim of intervening more incisively in the real, historical world
of post-Napoleonic Britain and Europe.
It is interesting, in this respect, that in the same year Blackwood’s will pub-
lish translations of letters by the Baron on the poetry of Thomas Moore, on Fox
and Pitt, on “Public Feeling,” and one letter directed at a German professor
of mathematics and harshly criticizing his anti-Christian, Humean-Voltairian
tendencies. These additional letters add to von Lauerwinkel’s historicity, as
they contain dates (the last letter, for example, is dated 1808) and a place name
(Osmanstadt—taken from the name of the villa that Wieland purchased and that
was situated some two miles outside of Weimar). Moreover, von Lauerwinkel
is by far not the only fictitious German author whose letters and essays are
translated in Blackwood’s. Another striking example is the German poet Philip
Kempferhausen, who first appears as the author of the “Letters from the Lakes,”
in which he describes his visit to the Lake District and his meetings with Southey
and Wordsworth. The actual author of the letters was John Wilson (Christopher
North) who simultaneously praised Wordsworth (against Jeffrey’s criticism)
and offended him by rudely breaking into his privacy (Wordsworth was not
amused and banned Blackwood’s from his household). Interestingly, this pseu-
dotranslation became the basis of Wordsworth’s status as poet-priest from the
1830s onwards. Again, as was the case with von Lauerwinkel, it takes a German,
culturally superior point of view to recognize the genius to which other British
critics remain blind. And again this external intervention is a fiction and fabri-
cated translation. More than von Lauerwinkel, Kempferhausen will migrate in
Blackwood’s self-created linguistic universe, as he appears as one of the partici-
pants in the “Noctes Ambrosianae” (a series of imaginary colloquies published
in Blackwood’s between 1822 and 1835) and will occasionally be used as a
pseudonym by Robert Gillies, Blackwood’s other expert in and translator of
German literature.
While this experimental engagement with pseudotranslation in the first few
volumes of Blackwood’s derived from Walter Scott’s metafictional play with
authorship, it led to further experiments with the genre, which culminated in
a work that has since stubbornly resisted critical domestication and generic
classification, that is, Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. While this “Rhapsodico-
reflective” anti-novel has been discussed from a variety of angles,6 what has
remained somewhat underexposed is the fact that the book initially appeared
as a serial publication in Fraser’s Magazine and that it is firmly rooted in ear-
lier pseudotranslational gestures in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.7 At the
same time, however, Sartor also takes this ironic gesture one step further
and pursues it to the point of articulating an incisive critique of the processes of
translation and cultural transfer as such.
90 Tom Toremans
When Sartor Resartus was published in book form in London in 1838, it
attracted far less attention than at the time of its publication in Boston two years
earlier, after which it became a founding text of American Transcendentalism.
In his preface to the American edition, Ralph Waldo Emerson urged its readers
not to be discouraged by the work’s peculiar style and its many “German idi-
oms” (Carlyle 1837, 3) and assured them that “the foreign dress and aspect of the
work are quite superficial, and cover a genuine Saxon heart” (Carlyle 1837, 4).
Emerson refers to the book’s cross-cultural engagement with German thought as it
presents itself as a translation by a British Editor of a German philosophical man-
uscript on Die Kleider, ihr Werden und Wirken, written by a Professor Diogenes
Teufelsdröckh and printed by Stillschweigen und Compagnie in Weissnichtwo in
1831. While Emerson clearly hinted at the fact that this translation was nothing
but a “masquerade” (Carlyle 1837, 3), an extensive review of an earlier version of
Sartor Resartus (“Reprinted for friends, from Fraser’s Magazine” (1835, 454)) in
the North American Review had stated the case more elaborately:

For ourselves, we incline to the opinion, that the only rogue in the company
is the “present editor.” We have said that the volume came before the public
under rather suspicious circumstances, and, after a careful study of the whole
ground, our belief is, that no such persons as Professor Teufelsdroeckh or
Counsellor Heuschrecke ever existed; . . . that the “present editor” is the only
Person who has ever written upon the Philosophy of Clothes; and that the
Sartor Resartus is the only treatise that has yet appeared upon that subject; —
in short, that the whole account of the origin of the work before us, which the
supposed editor relates with so much gravity . . . , is in plain English, a hum.
(1835, 456)

A.H. Everett, the reviewer in question, further substantiates his claim by not-
ing the absurd names in the book and the absence of any references to a Clothes
Philosophy in the German press. When the book appeared in London in 1838,
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine published a short review that concludes by referring
to Everett’s argument:

Editors and Booksellers Tasters have been at a loss what to make of [the
Clothes Philosophy], or even to determine whether the affair presented as a
translation from the German, was not what the English call a hoax, and the
Yankees a hum. The North American Reviewer had been nearly fairly bitten,
though his rare sagacity finally discovered that Professor Teufelsdröckh is
about as real as Tristram Shandy’s father, Captain Gulliver, or Don Quixote.
(1838, 612)

If Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus was thus soon revealed to be a hoax, Everett also
remarked that “fictions of this kind are . . . not uncommon” (458). While he
specifically referred to the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, Everett could also have
referred to the creation of fictional identities and faked manuscripts in the thriving
 Dousterswivel, von Lauerwinkel, and Teufelsdröckh 91
periodical culture of the time. In fact, a closer look at the concrete publication
history of Sartor Resartus firmly establishes the work in Scottish Romantic
periodical culture.
Before it appeared in book form in Boston in 1836, Sartor Resartus had been
serially published in eight consecutive installments in Fraser’s Magazine between
November 1833 and August 1834. Carlyle had worked on the manuscript since
1830 in his house in Craigenputtock, his final residence before definitively leav-
ing his native Scotland for London in 1834.8 The series evoked sharp criticism by
readers, with one reader threatening to cancel his subscription and the reviewer of
the Sun Newspaper complaining that the work:

is what old Dennis used to call “a heap of clotted nonsense,” mixed how-
ever, here and there, with passages marked by thought and striking poetic
vigor. But what does the writer mean by “Baphometic fire-baptism”? Why
cannot he lay aside his pedantry, and write so as to make himself gener-
ally intelligible? We quote by way of curiosity a sentence from the Sartor
Resartus; which may be read either backwards or forwards, for it is equally
intelligible either way: indeed, by beginning at the tail, and so working up
to the head, we think the reader will stand the fairest chance of getting at its
meaning . . . .9

Read in the original context of its periodical publication, slight shifts of empha-
sis occur. For one thing, the editor’s persona is relocated in a periodical print
culture that is particularly relevant for the work. As Will Christie has argued,10
Sartor Resartus should be read against the backdrop of the complex relationship
between Carlyle and Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review. The latter
had published Carlyle’s essays on “Jean Paul Richter” and “The State of German
Literature” in 1827, and “Characteristics” (his review of Friedrich Schlegel’s
Philosophische Vorlesungen) in 1831. Sartor Resartus should thus be situated in
a larger context of the reviews and translations of German literature and philoso-
phy in periodicals—an ongoing process of cultural exchange that often took on
challenging and experimental forms. In fact, its particular style and form can only
be properly understood by taking this context into account.
More particularly, relocating Sartor Resartus in its original periodical con-
text aptly demonstrates that the editor’s extensive critical engagement with
Teufelsdröckh’s fictitious philosophical manuscript can be traced back to
Lockhart’s pseudotranslational mock reviews in Blackwood’s. Christopher Scalia
has already suggested a direct influence of Lockhart’s review of Dousterswivel’s
Theorie der Betrug on Sartor Resartus, which similarly “purports to be a transla-
tion and review of a German philosophical tract” and alternates “between extended
quotation of the mysterious text and comment upon it” (Scalia 2012, 394). What
closely connects both pseudotranslations is their radical disruption of the rela-
tion between the primary text and review, between original and critical comment.
In the fifth chapter of his Theorie der Betrug (on “The Relation of Imposture
to Literature”), for example, Dousterswivel designates reviews as exemplary
92 Tom Toremans
vehicles of imposture to the extent that they are dependent on an original literary
text in order to claim critical authority:

In performing the office of reporters . . . the journalists are sometimes like the
ivy, which derives its support from the substantive trunk, and then mount-
ing aloft, flourishes in insolent displays over its head. Such is the image of
journalists, who, after reading a book, and sucking its contents, affect, in
their criticism, to know more than the author who wrote it, and completely
to over-reach him.
(Lockhart 1822, 683)

The ultimate ironic gesture, of course, derives from the fact that Lockhart’s own
review imposes itself on an imagined original, so that it performs the opposite of
what it states: it is an imposture, not because the reviewer imposed himself on
the author, but because it invents its own original. Lockhart’s pseudotranslational
review can thus be conceived as an ironic critique of periodical culture and its per-
formance of originality and critical authority. In a similar fashion, Sartor Resartus
can be read as a critique of periodical culture, yet at the same time it takes this
ironic gesture further and extends it towards the very act of translation itself. As I
have argued extensively elsewhere, the pseudotranslational performance of Sartor
Resartus ends up in a radical critique of organic models of translation.11 While it
pretends to provide an account of an all-too-materialist British editor’s attempts at
translating an all-too-transcendentalist German philosophical manuscript, it actu-
ally performs the impossibility of such cross-cultural transfer. The climax of this
performance occurs in one of the final chapters (the “Circumspective”), in which
the editor muses on his mediating role as reviewer and translator:

Along this most insufficient, unheard-of Bridge, which the Editor . . . has
now seen himself enabled to conclude if not complete, it cannot be his sober
calculation, but only his fond hope, that many have travelled without acci-
dent. No firm arch, overspanning the Impassable with paved highway, could
the Editor construct; only, as was said, some zigzag series of rafts floating
tumultuously thereon. Alas, and the leaps from raft to raft were too often of
a breakneck character. . . .
Nevertheless, if through this unpromising Horn-gate, Teufelsdröckh, and
we by means of him, have led thee into the true Land of Dreams; and through
the Clothes-Screen, as through a magical Pierre-Pertuis, thou lookest . . . into
the region of the Wonderful . . . then art thou profited beyond money’s worth,
and . . . perhaps in many a literary tea-circle, wilt open thy kind lips, and
audibly express that same.
(Carlyle 2000, 197–8)

Beyond the metaphorical excess of Dousterswivel’s Theorie der Betrug, this

fragment signals the end of the editor’s translational performance: instead of
translating, the editor merely repeats the metaphors of the bridge and the arch,
the labor of prophetic vision, and the highest work of Palingenesia that structure
 Dousterswivel, von Lauerwinkel, and Teufelsdröckh 93
Teufelsdröckh’s transcendentalist philosophy. More than an ironic critique of
contemporary reviewing culture, Sartor Resartus effects a performative critique
of the process of translation and as such it can be considered a climax of the
Scottish Romantic ironic experimentation with the genre of pseudotranslation,
as it develops from metafictional play with authorial identity and self-reflexive
critique of contemporaneous reviewing culture to a performative critique of the
act of translation.
From a literary historical point of view, the key question is whether these late-
Romantic experiments with pseudotranslation, taking place in close proximity
to Romantic experiments with authorship and authenticity, are indicative of a
(sub)genre that blends Romanticism’s literary innovation with its considerable
investment in processes of translation and cultural transfer. Both pseudotransla-
tion and the broader culture of translation it is part of are still in need of systematic
study. Such a study will have to address both the position of (pseudo)translation in
the broader cultural system and its complex relation to the Romantic experimental
forging of literature, authorship, and, for that matter, translation. As such, it will
require a collaborative effort of literary scholarship and (descriptive) Translation
Studies. As I hope to have demonstrated in this contribution, the genre (if that is
indeed what it is) of pseudotranslation presents itself as an open invitation for
such interdisciplinary investigation.

Notes
1 A forthcoming special issue on “Pseudotranslation and Metafictionality” (eds Beatrijs
Vanacker and Tom Toremans 2016) will present more studies on a variety of cases.
Toremans and Vanacker are also preparing a special issue on pseudotranslation for the
Canadian Review of Contemporary Literature, to be published in 2017.
2 For recent analyses of the texts in question see Bolton (2012) (on Southey), Esterhammer
(2009) (on Galt), and Rangarajan (2014) (on Hamilton).
3 For an extensive discussion of Walladmor (and its “retranslation” into English by
Thomas De Quincey), see de Groote and Toremans. Also see the first chapter of Roland
Jenn’s Pseudo-traduction.
4 Although a close analysis of the actual form and substance of cultural transfer in
Blackwood’s (as in other Romantic periodicals) is still to be pursued, Peter France
(2009) in a very timely and programmatic essay provides an overview of instances of
translations in Blackwood’s and the Edinburgh Review. The examples here are taken
from this insightful essay that convincingly claims that “the nineteenth century was
a time when British culture, although increasingly insular in many ways, was also
increasingly aware of a wide spread of world literature” and that an “important part
in this exploration was played by the thriving new periodical literature, which found
space both for translations of foreign works and for long reviews that often contained
substantial translated passages” (France 2009, 2).
5 For an overview of Lockhart’s engagement with German culture, see Ewen (1934).
6 The designation of Sartor as “Rhapsodico-reflective” is taken from John Sterling’s
evaluation of the work in a letter written to Carlyle in 1835 (see Seigel’s Thomas
Carlyle. The Critical Heritage 1971, 26–33).
7 Interest in the periodical context of the initial serial publication of Sartor Resartus has
been relatively scarce. For a notable exception, see the final chapter of Mark Parker’s
Literary Magazines and British Romanticism (2006), which firmly situates the work in
the broader context of Fraser’s Magazine.
94 Tom Toremans
8 For a detailed account of the composition and first publication of Sartor Resartus, see
Rodger L. Tarr’s introduction to the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition (2000),
esp. xlii–lxxv.
9 The review is reprinted in the first Appendix (“Testimonies of Authors”) to the Norman
and Charlotte Strouse edition of Sartor Resartus (2000, 222).
10 See the first chapter in Christie’s The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of
Romantic Britain (2009).
11 See Tom Toremans (2011) “Sartor Resartus and the Rhetoric of Translation.”
Translation and Literature 20.1 (2011): 61–78.

References
Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005. Print.
Beebee, Thomas O. and Amano, Ikuho. “Pseudotranslation in the Fiction of Akutagawa
Ryūnosuke.” Translation Studies 3.1 (2010): 17–32. Print.
Bolton, Carol. “Through Spanish Eyes: Robert Southey’s Double Vision in Letters from
England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella (1807).” Victoriographies 2.1 (2012):
1–14. Print.
Burwick, Frederick. “How to Translate a Waverley Novel: Sir Walter Scott, Willibald
Alexis, and Thomas De Quincey.” Wordsworth Circle 25.2 (1994): 93–100. Print.
Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three
Books. Boston: James Munroe, 1837.
–––. Sartor Resartus. The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh in Three Books. Eds.
Rodger L. Tarr and Mark Engel. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 2000. Print.
Christie, William. The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain:
Mammoth and Megalonyx. London and Brookfield: Pickering and Chatto. 2009. Print.
De Groote Brecht and Tom Toremans. “From Alexis to Scott and De Quincey: Walladmor
and the Irony of Pseudotranslation.” Essays in Romanticism 21.2 (2014): 107–23. Print.
Du Pont, Olaf. “Robert Gravess Claudian Novels: A Case of Pseudotranslation.” Target
17:2 (2005): 327–47. Print.
Esterhammer, Angela. “London Periodicals, Scottish Novels, and Italian Fabrications:
Andrew of Padua, the Improvisatore Re-Membered.” Studies in Romanticism 48.3
(2009): 469–91. Print.
Ewen, Frederic. “John Gibson Lockhart, Propagandist of German Literature.” Modern
Language Notes 49.4 (1934): 260–5. Print.
France, Peter. “Looking Abroad: Two Edinburgh Journals in the Early Nineteenth
Century.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 46. 1 (2009): 2–15. Print.
Gürçağlar, Şehnaz Tahir. “Scouting the Borders of Translation: Pseudotranslation,
Concealed Translations and Authorship in Twentieth-Century Turkey.” Translation
Studies 3.2 (2010): 172–87. Print.
Higgins, David. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity,
Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.
Jenn, Ronald. La pseudo-traduction, de Cervantès à Mark Twain. Leuven: Peeters, 2013. Print.
Lockhart, John Gibson. “Dousterswivel’s Inquiry into the Theory of Imposture.”
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 11.65 (June 1822): 680–3. British Periodicals
Online. Web. 29 January 2016.
Martens, David and Beatrijs Vanacker, eds. Scénographies de la pseudo-traduction. Spec.
issue of Les lettres romanes 67. 3–4 (2013). Print.
 Dousterswivel, von Lauerwinkel, and Teufelsdröckh 95
“Notice from the Editor.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2.7 (1817): 680–2. British
Periodicals Online. Web. 29 January 2016.
O’Sullivan, Carol. “Pseudotranslation.” Handbook of Translation Studies Online. Ed.
Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Web.
3 February 2016.
Parker, Mark. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2006. Print.
Rangarajan, Padma. Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth
Century. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Print.
Rath, Brigitte. “Pseudotranslation.” America Comparative Literature Association State of
the Discipline Report—Ideas of the Decade. 1 April 2014. Web. 2 November 2015.
–––. “‘His words only?’ Indra Sinha’s Pseudotranslation Animal’s People as Hallucinations
of a Subaltern Voice.” AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 38.2 (2013):
161–83. Print.
“Remarks on the Periodical Criticism of England—In a Letter to a Friend.” Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine 2.12 (1818): 670–9. British Periodicals Online. Web. 29 January
2016.
Robinson, Douglas. 1998. “Pseudotranslation”. Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation
Studies. Ed. Mona Baker. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. 183–5. Print.
Russett, Margaret. Fictions and Fakes. Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–1845.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Print.
“Sartor Resartus. The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh.” Rev. of Sartor Resartus
by Thomas Carlyle. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 5.57 (1838): 611–12. Print.
Scalia, Christopher J. “Transcendental Buffoonery: Jacob Dousterswivel and the Romantic
Irony of Blackwood’s.” Studies in Romanticism 51.3 (2012): 375–98. Print.
Seigel, Jules Paul, ed. Thomas Carlyle: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1971.
Print.
Scott, Walter. The Betrothed. Tales of the Crusaders. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: Constable, 1832.
Print.
“Thomas Carlyle. Sartor Resartus: in three books. Reprinted for friends, from Fraser’s
Magazine. London. 1834.” Rev. of Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle. The North
American Review 41.89 (1835): 454–82. Print.
Thomas, Lionel H. C. “Walladmor: A Pseudo-Translation of Sir Walter Scott.” The
Modern Language Review 46. 2 (1951): 218–31. Print.
Toremans, Tom. “Sartor Resartus and the Rhetoric of Translation.” Translation and
Literature 20.1 (2011): 61–78. Print.
Toury, Gideon. “Enhancing Cultural Changes by means of Fictitious Translations.”
Translation and Cultural Change. Studies in History, Norms and Image-Projection.
Ed. Eva Hung. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. 3–17. Print.
–––. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Rev. ed. Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
John Benjamins Publishing, 2012. Print.
Vanacker, Beatrijs and Tom Toremans, eds. Pseudotranslation and Metafictionality. Spec.
issue of Interférences Littéraires 19 (forthc. 2016).
–––. Pseudotranslation. Spec. issue of Canadian Review of Contemporary Literature
(forthc. 2017).
Wheatley, Kim. Shelley and His Readers. Beyond Paranoid Politics. Columbia and
London: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Print.
6 Finneganów tren, Da Capo al
Finne, and Finnegans _ake
Krzysztof Bartnicki, translation
and authorship
John Kearns

In his book Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes Patrick O’Neill surveys a range
of different translations of some, or occasionally all, of James Joyce’s recondite
masterpiece and identifies three currents that seem to prevail among the strategies
adopted and their approaches to fidelity. There are explanatory versions, which
attempt to “identify what appears to the particular translator to be at least the
surface meaning of the text” (O’Neill 2013, 288). One such rendering might be
C.K. Ogden’s early intralingual translation of the closing pages of the “Anna
Livia Plurabelle” section into Basic English. Such translations, as Ogden notes,
aim “to preserve merely a surface narrative coherence rather than striving for mul-
tiple textual resonances” (O’Neill 2013, 289). There are then what O’Neill calls
imitative versions “attempting to reproduce as faithfully as possible the play of the
text, including as far as possible some rendering of its pervasively flaunted poly-
semy” (O’Neill 2013, 288). In other words, wordplay in the original is replaced by
wordplay in the target text, rather than explained. Finally, there are what he calls
competitive versions, which attempt “to outdo Joyce at his own game, utilizing the
original text as a springboard for displays of verbal pyrotechnics” (O’Neill 2013,
288). Yet what is most interesting in O’Neill’s assessment is that the translator
who seems most intent on out-Joyceing Joyce is Joyce himself! The first example
of a translation in this category that O’Neill quotes is the 1931 French translation
of part of Anna Livia Plurabelle, a revision and extension by various hands, work-
ing under Joyce’s supervision,1 of a translation from the previous year by Samuel
Beckett and Alfred Péron; the second example is the 1940 Italian translation of
the same text, translated by Joyce with Nino Frank.
As O’Neill notes, the “most interesting aspect of Joyce’s renderings of his own
work . . . is his almost completely cavalier attitude to any necessity of translatorial
fidelity to the original text in any normal sense” (O’Neill 2013, 290). As evidence,
one can take the example noted by Umberto Eco of the huge reduction of fluvial
references in the Italian version of “Anna Livia Plurabelle”: “having spent almost
ten years looking for many hundreds of river names to include in ‘Anna Livia
Plurabelle’, Joyce simply ‘discarded nearly nine-tenths of them’” (O’Neill 2013,
290, quoting Eco 2001, 115).
This poses a dilemma: do we regard these translations as exceptional, and as
such permit Joyce—as author of the source text—a greater degree of freedom
 Finneganów tren 97
in the way he renders (or helps to render) his own texts into other languages?
Alternatively do we regard them as paradigms of what Joyce expected from his
translators? If we regard them as exceptional, then we can still fall back on more
traditional notions of translation in assessing other (non-self-) translations. Yet,
if they are to be regarded as paradigms, we need to revise entirely our notions
of fidelity and our ideas about what a good translation is. Some have done so:
Umberto Eco has written that Finnegans Wake may be “the easiest of all texts
to translate, in that it permits a maximum of creative liberty” on the part of the
translator (O’Neill 2013, 4). There may be a natural resistance to thinking of one
of the most difficult novels to read in English (or perhaps any language) as being
among the easiest to translate. Yet whether or not we regard Joyce as setting the
example for other translators depends on our understanding of authorship—both
the implications of Joyce’s relationship to the text as author and the degree to
which a translator may assume her or his own auctorial status in attempting to
translate a work such as Finnegans Wake. Certainly the more traditional or con-
servative our conception of translation (and perhaps of untranslatability), the
more impervious Finnegans Wake appears to translation—the opposite of Eco’s
position. While Joyce never commented publicly in any detail on his transla-
tion preferences, he does not appear to have subscribed to such conservative
notions—Ellmann reports him as saying “There is nothing that cannot be trans-
lated” (Ellman 1982, 632) and this would certainly be supported by O’Neill’s
observations.
This chapter is less concerned here with prescriptive assessments of such trans-
lation strategies than with examining how such radical approaches as those of
Joyce himself and others might be legitimized and the implications that this will
have for our understanding of the translator and her/his relationship to “author-
ship.” Thus our enterprise is sympathetic to the stance adopted by Descriptive
Translation Studies (Toury 2012). Ultimately it will be norms (societal, literary,
linguistic, etc.) that will determine what is regarded as “legitimate” in translation.
If we are satisfied that such legitimate translation is to include (and possibly privi-
lege) O’Neill’s “competitive” versions, does this then require us to reconsider the
relationship between translator and author(ship)?
Many theorists have wanted to grant the translator comparable status with
the author of the source text, perhaps most famously Lawrence Venuti in
The Translator’s Invisibility who, in keeping with critical thinking about the
death of the author post-Barthes and Foucault, opposes the traditional Romantic
concept of authorship that relegates what the translator does to something merely
derivative. It seems undeniable that there will always be some level of aucto-
rial intervention in translating insofar as translation is (famously) almost never
a distinct transfer of meaning from one language to another. As Anthony Pym
in his investigation of translation and the possibilities of authorship has noted,
“translators like all authors transform texts, bring newness into the world, have
complex productive cognition processes churning within them as they work, and
are all different” and thus they are “subjective in their minds and creative in
their writing.” As such “to say that the translator has authorship is to say that all
98 John Kearns
authors work translationally” and this level of translatorial “authorship” is, for
Pym, unproblematic (Pym 2011, 31–2).
Yet authorship requires something greater than creativity. According to Pym,
authorship also implies an ethical responsibility towards the text, and this is more
problematic. Pym, working from the formal pragmatics of Habermas and Goffman,
provides several alternatives to “creative” criteria for authorship and these, he
argues, render the position of translator-as-author more problematic. Firstly, an
author is someone whose position is established by his or her words—when they
use the first person singular, this is understood to refer to themselves; translators,
on the other hand, adopt the alien “I”—for a translator to use first person to refer
to him/herself, a translator’s note is required in a footnote or preface, physically
separated from the main text. Secondly, translators are not generally required to
make validity claims about the content of their productions—authorship involves
standing over the claims made in a text and defending them; no such expectation is
made of translators. Thirdly, translators are not usually required to swear commit-
ment to their words or to stand over the claims made by the authors of source texts
in the same way that is required of those authors. While it can be presumed that
translators in certain fields (for example, Bible translation) will probably be fully
committed to the message of the texts they translate, this is far from a universal
and often what is required is professional detachment from the texts (especially,
for example, from poorly written texts).
Pym’s fourth argument for translators as non-authors comes not from formal
pragmatics, but from process studies: Immonen (2006) noted that translators pause
less frequently in the first draft than writers of source texts and revise for longer,
while Jensen (2001) looking at two different modes of writing—“knowledge
transforming” and “knowledge telling”—found that more experienced translators
tended to use the “knowledge telling” model more consistently since they “engage
less in problem-solving, goal-setting and re-analyzing behaviour vis-à-vis young
professional translators” (Jensen 2001, 177). As Pym notes, translation seems to
be a very different form of writing with translators dealing “with the text as it
comes, with limited involvement and responsibility. Indeed we might surmise
that, when becoming experts, translators learn to become rather less like authors”
(Pym 2011, 41, his italics).
Before providing some counterarguments, it should be stressed that Pym
does intend these criteria to apply to translation in general, including literary
translation—he prefaces his discussion by noting that claims for translatorial
authorship have emanated from within literary studies, and thus it is in response
to such claims that his arguments are to be understood. This is perhaps surpris-
ing considering that Pym’s requirements are not only particularly useful when it
comes to considering literary translation, but, moreover, that a work as innova-
tive as Finnegans Wake poses further challenges to the appropriateness of all the
criteria that Pym outlines. Obviously works of fiction do not require authors to
establish their own position with the use of their own words—use of first per-
son singular does not generally refer to authors in their own literary texts and
characters can voice opinions and engage in actions that their authors might find
 Finneganów tren 99
objectionable. Furthermore, Finnegans Wake is a text that challenges the very
fixedness of characters and pronouns—the “protagonist” Humphrey Chimpden
Earwicker appears in various guises and with various names, and his name itself
is characterized by a fluidity, with the “HCE” motif being manifest in an array of
different ways throughout the work. In any case, to return to the post-structural
critiques of authorship posed by Barthes and Foucault, these addressed precisely
the matter of auctorial subjectivity raised in fiction, in which the reader can also
be credited with complementing the authorship of the text.
Regarding Pym’s second criterion, naturally neither author nor translator of
a work of fiction is required to claim that the events depicted therein actually
happened—such an expectation runs contrary to the very notion of fiction. Of
course, as Pym notes, this has not been enough to prevent many unfortunate trans-
lators from being persecuted for their work and this applies as much to literary as
to non-literary translators—he lists Salman Rushdie’s translators Hitoshi Igarashi
(who was murdered), Ettore Capriolo (stabbed), and Aziz Nesin (whose attempted
assassination led to the Sivas massacre of 1995) as cases in point—but alleged
responsibility is obviously a long way from actual culpability and Rushdie him-
self had many supporters from the literary community at the time of his fatwa in
any case. This also relates to the third of Pym’s requirements: fiction authors again
can hardly be required to swear commitment to the world and actions of the char-
acters in their novels, nor can their translators. They will certainly, however, have
an intimate knowledge and relationship with this world, and this will usually be
shared by the translator. This issue of the intimacy shared by author and translator
through immersion in the world of a novel is important—while intimacy alone
does not necessarily betoken authorship, it does position the translator far closer
to an author than a reader. This notion of intimacy is an important one in consider-
ing the translation of Finnegans Wake and we shall return to it later.
As for the evidence Pym quotes from process studies, it is difficult to apply
the results of the studies cited to a text such as Finnegans Wake, which took its
author sixteen years to write and Polish translator Krzysztof Bartnicki ten years
to translate. However, to focus more precisely on Jensen’s claim in the light of
O’Neill’s “competitive” translation strategy, it seems that Joyce himself was
championing a “knowledge transforming” approach to translation in French and
Italian excerpts published and it is even hard to see how O’Neill’s “imitative”
versions really exemplify a “knowledge telling” writing model. One of the central
tenets of Modernist literature is that language can occupy the spotlight in and of
itself, and that this foregrounding of linguistic materiality can itself generate new
meanings, as Beckett implied about Joyce’s work: “Here form is content, content
is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written
at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at
and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself ”
(Beckett 1979, 14). It would thus not be unreasonable to propose that the most
appropriate translation approach to such texts should be one that respects this
materiality, which makes O’Neill’s “competitive” and, at the very least “imita-
tive” approaches entirely appropriate.
100 John Kearns
Yet considering Pym’s arguments overall, and setting aside for a moment the
issue of authorship, one is left more intrigued by his attempt to harness formal
pragmatics and empirical process data for a universalist translation conception
when they seem so eminently unsuited to literary translation in general and the
translation of a text such as Finnegans Wake in particular. I would strongly agree
with him when he remarks on the obviousness of his starting point—translators
are not authors. We are all familiar with the difference between the author of
a novel, play, or poem and with the translator of same, and while certain more
experimental works may problematize this relationship, these are the exceptions
that prove the rule. As Pym notes, his investigations are “in the spirit of testing
what seems obvious, in the same way that first-year science classes ask students
to demonstrate that the earth is a sphere” (Pym 2011, 33). What I think Pym
is missing is a way to characterize the uniqueness of the auctorial involvement
of the translator. This is not the same as saying that he or she is an author, but
rather to return to the point made earlier, to characterize the intimacy of the rela-
tionship between the translator and the text. True there will be times when this
intimacy will be called into question, such as when a translator is going through
the motions, working on a text that she or he finds unappealing or is complet-
ing solely for payment. It is also true that, with the use of CAT (computer-aided
translation) tools and even MT (machine translation), the translator’s relationship
to the text becomes more detached, but such tools generally have no place in liter-
ary translation, and thus the intimacy comes to characterize the activity. And such
intimacy can only be heightened in the translation of a work such as Finnegans
Wake over as long a period as ten years. The chapter began by proposing that a
text such as Finnegans Wake, along with Joyce’s translation of it, may prompt
us to reconsider our notions of translation and fidelity. Could it be that such a
reconsideration might also require us to reassess our ideas about translation and
authorship?

On 29 February 2012 Krzysztof Bartnicki’s Polish translation of Finnegans Wake

was published under the title Finneganów tren by Liberatura and Korporacja
Ha!Art in Kraków. Aside from the matter of the translation itself, the book is
also interesting in the fact that it almost does not differ from the 1939 original
in certain physical respects at all. The shade of brown and the yellow lettering
on the cover are precisely the same as were used on Joyce’s original. Moreover,
while the book has more words than the original, it has exactly the same number
of pages—628. Moreover, still, major narrative events that happen on particular
pages of the source text, happen on exactly those same pages of this translation.
In fact, it took the typesetters three months of kerning and compositing to arrange
the text in such a way as to achieve this. Why?
Finnegans Wake is famously a circular narrative with the last line on the last
page returning to the first. In other words, the shape of the book is circular. The
formula for the circumference of a circle is 2πR.
 Finneganów tren 101
π = 3.14159
3.1459 × 2 = 628/R 3.1459 × 2 = 6.292
Thus when 2πR = 628, then R = 100

That the radius of the circle of Finnegans Wake should be exactly 100 if its cir-
cumference is 628 is unlikely to be entirely coincidental. Moreover, 6 and 28 are
perfect numbers. Furthermore, it is on page 100 of the 1939 edition of Finnegans
Wake that one finds the famous passage ending with the phrase “the canonicity
of his existence as a tesseract” (comparing HCE to a hypercube). More prag-
matically, an edition that maintains similar pagination to the original also makes
it easier to refer to Joyce’s page-by-page annotations.
As such, Finnegans Wake is more than an experimental literary narrative—
its very physical structure as artifact contributes to it as an overall artwork.
Consequently, in considering Finneganów tren, we can either see it as a book that
attempts to match literary and translation experimentation with formal innovation
or, perhaps more interestingly, as a work that expands the notion of translation to
acknowledge a physical, structural relationship between the translated book and
the original.
Of course, the issue could be raised as to how legitimate it is to draw general
conclusions about the nature of literary translation from a work as singular as
Finnegans Wake. In one sense it represents a ne plus ultra in translation terms,
with the effort involved in translating the work as a whole being so vast as to
elevate the translator to a certain celebrity status.2 A comparison could, perhaps,
be drawn with the translation of Georges Perec’s lipogram La disparition—an
entire novel that does not use the letter “e”—which, when it appeared in English
in 1994 again without using “e,” brought a level of celebrity for its translator
Gilbert Adair to which most literary translators are unaccustomed (Perec 1994,
Jackson 1994).3 Most translators nowadays work to hide the trace of their own
intervention in the transfer of a literary work between languages (a notion central
to Venuti’s enterprise in The Translator’s Invisibility). While Bartnicki helped to
publicize Finneganów tren following its publication in 2012, the book itself does
not foreground his own presence in terms any more conspicuous than most novels
in translation, (though it does feature a brief “Afterword” by the publishers). Our
purpose here is not to engage in an analysis of the style of Bartnicki’s translation.
For present purposes, suffice it to say that while we may concede that the transla-
tion must certainly have been long (ten years in total) and onerous—and while
such an effort will probably lead to a translator having a very distinct and intimate
relationship with a text—no auctorial intervention from the translator is marked
on Finneganów tren in any way other than one might usually find on any literary
work. Rather it is the questions posed by the works which Bartnicki published
subsequent to the appearance of Finneganów tren that this chapter shall focus on
as these raise interesting issues about his relationship to Joyce’s text.
Later in 2012—the same year that had seen the publication of Finneganów
tren—Bartnicki published a book called Da Capo al Finne.4 Bartnicki is pre-
sented as the author of this book in the conventional ways: his name is on the
102 John Kearns
cover and title page, it is copyrighted to him, and so on. The book features
a “Foreword” [Przedmowa] followed by “Notes” [Uwagi] in Polish, both of
which he signs ‘krzysztoF BArtniCki’. The remaining 121 pages of the book
(see Figure 6.1) are made up of blocks of unspaced text featuring the letters a, b,
c, d, e, f, g, and h in lower and (some) upper case.
In his “Foreword” Bartnicki explains that the text that follows is the full text
of Finnegans Wake minus all the letters of the alphabet except the first eight; all
spacing, punctuation, digits, and symbols have also been removed. Each letter
represents a note, as it would in conventional music notation.5 As such, Finnegans

Figure 6.1 An example of the last pages of Bartnicki’s Da Capo al Finne

 Finneganów tren 103
Wake has been transformed into a musical work—if each letter is taken to repre-
sent a note, then within the mass of these letters are dozens of melodies waiting to
be heard. While the text is obviously not a typical musical score (no indications
are given of rhythm, note duration, speed, phrasing, etc.), it is not inconceivable
that it could be played note for note in the order in which the notes are listed.
Furthermore, the selection of notes is so vast that undoubtedly many individual
melodies are contained within their selection.
The following is a translation of excerpts (with some additions) from
Bartnicki’s “Foreword”:6

Finnegans Wake is principally a literary text, not a musical one; but Da Capo
al Finne can, on occasion, mean not only musically, but also lexically. For
example, the words cottage (FW 79, passim), collage (FW 279), courage
(FW 313), cage (FW 197, FW 563) carry the same sound sequence: c–a–g–e.
So, 4 different words of the Wake are reduceable to one “musical” word.
However, as pointed out already, this musical word can be played in various
different ways—certainly more than four.
In addition, letter-to-sound reduction may bear lexical fruit, e.g. text “A
liss in hunterland” (FW 276) is reduced to 5 notes—which read “ahead” and
“a head.”
Further still, each melody hidden in Da Capo al Finne has its founder-text
in Finnegans Wake. So when I decoded a theme of The Godfather soundtrack
and traced back its FW passage, I was amazed to see it ends with “Roman
Godhelic faix” (think: Godfather) and starts with “Warhorror” (“the horror”,
hence Heart of Darkness, hence Apocalypse Now, hence Marlon Brando,
hence Kurtz). It is possible for additional artistic tension to arise.
Regardless, the recipient of Joyce-derived music seems to enjoy greater
rights than the reader of Joyce’s literature. Should the reader of Finnegans
Wake choose to articulate letters longer or shorter, change hiatuses, extend
pauses between phrases or sentences, none of this would seriously impact on
the meaning of the text. But try changing the duration of a musical note or a
pause, and a new tune will be born. Decisions on durations of notes/silences
are key, as they effect different musical “meanings.”
Or perhaps are they not rights, but responsibilities? Perhaps the recipi-
ent of Da Capo al Finne helps the slothful composer out in their work? (If
so, then James Joyce should be accused of laziness as he did not specify
any pronunciation system for Finnegans Wake’s language—although he
advocated reading the text aloud. And composers of aleatory music could
be reprimanded for leaving their imprecise scores at the discretion of their
performers. And so on.)
I have not just carved out a block of 8 letters. I did some examining, too.
And I can report that there are various tunes hidden in Da Capo al Finne—
ones I composed, will compose, as well as melodies I cannot compose, for
they already had been composed by others, in times before and after Joyce’s.
This is not the place to enumerate them.
104 John Kearns
Anyway. Da Capo al Finne stores nearly 400,000 letters. This is a lot of
music. It can be played in fragment or in whole, just like the Wake can be
enjoyed in whole or bit by bit. In effect, this publication can be viewed as a
set of many, many melodies, or as just one giant symphony.
But it is not only about music and playing with letters. My literature-to-
music reduction raises more questions of interdisciplinary or general nature:
––––––
Is Da Capo al Finne a book? A music score?
You tell me.
––––––
So, if I find a theme here which sounds more or less like, say, Deep
Purple –– will I be a plagiarist? Would Joyce be the author? (Given that he
authored the Wake?) Would I? (As I reduced the Wake to letters to sounds
to notes to the melody?) Or Deep Purple? (As, if they had not made their
melody first, I would not be able to look for its sound-alikes?) Further dis-
cussion on copyrights shows how we could benefit from the Wake taken
onto nonliterary levels.
With these questions—and many more you can think of—I leave you.
krzysztoF BartniCki
(Bartnicki 2012)

As an addendum to this I should add that when Bartnicki sent me Da Capo al

Finne, he also made a request: he asked me, on the title page, below the title, to
write “To James Joyce,” and then to sign my name. As such, Bartnicki is listed
as author, yet it is I the “reader” who has been asked to sign it, and to dedicate
it to James Joyce (without whom it naturally would not exist). While this may
complicate the matter of authorship, it is consonant with what he writes about
how I, he, and possibly Joyce too are stakeholders in the matter of the book’s
authorship.
On his Soundcloud page,7 Bartnicki has posted some of the melodies he has
found in the midst of the text. Among them is a tune that sounds for all intents and
purposes the same as John Williams’s “Imperial March” (sometimes called the
“Darth Vader Theme”) from The Empire Strikes Back. Again, the issue of author-
ship is raised—did this tune exist in this form before Williams composed it in
1980? Or is Bartnicki’s spotting of it itself a plagiarism? The improbability of two
translators ever translating a literary text in exactly the same way is well-known;
what about a pre-existing musical text being derived from a literary text?
It could, of course, be countered that anyone could have taken Joyce’s text
and removed letters, spaces, and symbols from it in the way that Bartnicki has
done to create this kind of “score”—that the fact that Bartnicki happened to
have translated the text previously is incidental. This is true. Yet it is as a trans-
lator of Finnegans Wake on which Bartnicki’s reputation rests and thus it is in
this context that this experiment can be seen. To return to the matter of intimacy
in the relationship between translator and text raised earlier, Da Capo al Finne
can in some ways be seen as a comment on authorship, on the ownership of
 Finneganów tren 105
words and what those words stand for. Bartnicki was to problematize the rela-
tionship between translator and author more explicitly (and elaborately) in his
next project.
Two years after Da Capo al Finne Bartnicki published a second book, this time
attributing authorship not to himself but to James Joyce, and crediting himself as
“arranger.” Again the title is listed in different forms: F_nnegans _a_e or alter-
nately Finnegans _ake, both with the subtitle Suite in the Key of Ш. Ш here is to
be read as “siglum” and refers to Joyce’s use of same in writing Finnegans Wake.
The novel is structured around a core set of character types that Joyce indicated
with these signs; onto these types he hung a variety of names, occupations, physi-
cal characteristics, and so on. As such, the sigla have become almost synonymous
with the underlying construction of the work and thus “key” in Suite in the
Key of Ш takes on the dual meaning of musical key as well as a means of unlock-
ing something (and there are undoubtedly other readings).
The text of this book is more recognizable as having been derived from
Finnegans Wake than is Da Capo al Finne, though it is heavily annotated for
musical performance. In an afterword, Bartnicki provides further explanation,
this time in English, beginning with the claim “Finnegans Wake does not exist.”
Justification comes on the grounds of textual indeterminacy, in particular the pro-
liferation of source texts: in 1939 alone two versions appeared (the first delivered
hastily for Joyce’s birthday on 2 February, the second a revised version in May),
and these were followed by a corrected version in 1945, followed by editions in
1950, 1958, 1959, 1964, 1975, 1976, and 1982, each of which included various
revisions and rectifications. While such differences in a text as famously impene-
trable as Finnegans Wake might be regarded by some as pedantry, for a translator
they pose a serious problem: Bartnicki notes that when the Dutch translation by
Erik Bindervoet and Robbert-Jan Henkes was published in a bilingual Dutch/
English edition in 2002, it came with a list of some 2000 possible improvements.
Eight years later Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon published a “new reading of
Finnegans Wake” incorporating “9000 minor yet crucial corrections and amend-
ments” (Joyce 2014, 373).
As such, it seems that Joyce’s novel is a work that will always be characterized
by an indeterminacy at least as great as the literary experimentation with which
it has always been associated. The proliferation of editions compound the chal-
lenges posed by a similar proliferation of interpretations or “keys” to the text:
Bartnicki writes:

During my own attempts at rendering Finnegans Wake into Polish, I learned

of the possible English key to the interpretation of the text (as its lexicon
rests on English). And the Irish key (as Joyce was Irish). And the Sleep key
(as the text professes to mimic “nat language” of the dreaming mind). And
the Egyptian key. And the Polish key. And the Hebrew key. Or the German
vs Romanic key. And there is the Morse Code key to the rhythm of the text
(or its last page at least). And there are more keys, not least of which is the
Music key.
106 John Kearns
Is there anyone who would summon a certitude to claim one approach is
better than all the others? Even if such an approach existed, not all would
agree with the certitude. So, paradoxically (again):
Joyce’s work is never his.
Since there is no universally accepted understanding of Finnegans
Wake—indeed if there were anything that could be universally accepted, it
would be our not understanding it—interpretation has the final say, changing
from reader to reader.
(Bartnicki 2014, 374–5)

That Joyce’s work is not his own is an especially interesting claim for a trans-
lator to make with respect to the notions of authorship that we have been
investigating—issues that were central to Da Capo al Finne. Bartnicki continues:

As it is up to us what Finnegans Wake means—we are free to deconstruct

or reconstruct it—then James Joyce (construed as the name required on the
cover of the book) has not yet written his final book.
(Bartnicki 2014, 376)

Fluidity of interpretation becomes apparent in very tangible ways. While transla-

tors may have little to go on as far as knowing how Joyce would like his text to
be translated, the links between Joyce, Finnegans Wake, and music have long
been clear. Musical notation itself features in the novel, including “The Ballad
of Persse O’Reilly” (Part 1, chapter 2) and the B.C.A.D motif in the margin of
(Part 2, chapter 2). The latter could, of course, refer to historical time (“Before
Christ” and “Anno Domini”), while similarly the replacement of the B♭ with H/h
in countries such as Germany and Poland famously allows B-A-C-H to be played
on the keyboard.
Bartnicki quotes Jack W. Weaver, an authority on music in Joyce, who main-
tains that Finnegans Wake is not merely Joyce’s suite, but more specifically his
suite in the key of E flat, as Weaver sees Joyce’s siglum (Ш) as an E lying on the
flat of its back (Weaver 1998). Bartnicki, however, argues for this siglum to stand
for E sharp because “to me, its arms are protruding upwards as three sharp pikes.
Moreover,” he adds, “as it is a capital letter, the key or the suite would be Major,
not Minor” (Joyce 2014, 376–7).
Thus, in response to Weaver’s system of siglum notation, Bartnicki produces
his own: instead of deriving a musical text exclusively from the first eight letters
of the alphabet, this time Bartnicki adds S and s (as an equivalent to E flat, again
with upper and lower case denoting major/minor keys respectively), along with
the letters from the solfège set “DRMFSLTdrmfslt,” adding U as the equivalent to
the syllable ‘Do’. He then also adds letters from the Indian equivalent to solfège,
the sargam set: “DGMNPRSdgmnr,” and this is then complemented by numer-
als from the Chinese jianpu numbered system of musical notation: 1234567.
Joyce’s spacing between words and sentences (though not paragraphs) is also left
in the final text. Bartnicki then provides a long list of characters (not underlined)
 Finneganów tren 107
and a key to how they should be musically interpreted. In a mode of interpreta-
tion not dissimilar to Freudian dream interpretation or the Lacanian glissement
of signifiers, the same character can be interpreted in various different ways, for
example:

E/e note
e minimus (little finger) [guitar] (also referred to by c and x)
F/f note
F/f Fa [solfège]
f forte
f folio
f fragore (with crash/clang) [neume]
(Bartnicki 2014, 379)

This is then followed by a list of note variations on single characters. The E note
variations are of particular interest as it is here we find the use of the siglum again:
to the E/e signs above are added

é E note
ê E note
è E note
έ É note
3 É note (siglum)
8 É note (siglum)
4 É note (siglum)
œ E note preceded by o
(Bartnicki 2014, 381)

Further annotation is provided by indicating in the text pauses where there is a

line/verse end in the original text used by Bartnicki (the 1958 Viking edition) as
well as longer pauses where page, chapter, and part ends in the original:

ǂ line pause; end of FW line/verse

ǁ 1 bar pause: end of FW page
ǁǁ 2 bars pause: end of FW chapter
ǁǁǁ 3 bars pause: end of FW part

This is just a brief summary of what is a very detailed (an)notation system, and
the text is embellished with many other symbols. The opening page of
Finnegans _ake is presented in Figure 6.2. As can be seen, far more of Joyce’s
original text remains, making it visually recognizable as (whatever we may con-
ceive of as) Finnegans Wake—perhaps it is for this reason that its authorship
is credited to Joyce rather than Bartnicki?8 Unlike Da Capo al Finne, no part
108 John Kearns
of Finnegans _ake has yet been performed (and it probably poses greater sight-
reading and interpretation challenges to any performer who does decide to take it
on, in whole or even in part).
After his very elaborate system has been presented, Bartnicki closes the book
with a discussion of the sigla. Here he expands on the possible interpretations
(and uses—as the act of translation stresses the bond between reading and using)
for the sigla, continuing in the vein of his departure from Weaver. Ultimately,
what the sigla provide is a meta-code for the book, above (or below?) the level
of language and narrative. The fact that their signifieds are in flux (again, simi-
lar to the Lacanian conception of dreamwork) liberates Bartnicki in the spirit

Figure 6.2 The opening page of Finnegans_ake

 Finneganów tren 109
referred to by Eco earlier with his claims of ease of translation for an ostensibly
difficult work.

For instance, the siglum (1) [for HCE] recalls a 3-string instrument. The
strings, the fret, together they resemble H. The male protagonist would be a
provider of sounds then.
(Bartnicki 2014, 388)

This again reinforces the musical underpinnings of the novel.

This siglum can be rotated. As Ш, it stands for the key of this suite
[discussed earlier]. As E, it draws our attention to the principle building block
of the lexicon—the English language. However, as “E sharp” can be musi-
cally synonymous with “F”, the rotation of Ш might suggest this: There is
English in the book, but twisted to such an extent that it eventually transforms
into Foreign. The key of F can be the home key of the English horn, true, but
the instrument is oft named “cor anglais”—which looks and sounds Foreign.
Plainly French . . . Further symbolism is available, e.g., H resembles the
“Mute on” sign while Ш resembles the “Mute off” sign.
(Bartnicki 2014, 388)

Bartnicki then provides similar considerations for the sigla for the Mother (ALP),
Shem-Cain-Tree (the Son), and Shaun-Abel-Stone (Shem’s twin brother), before
returning to the siglum for HCE, noting that if one “soften[s] its curves to be more
feminine . . . it will become a fermata”—again a return to music. “Sometimes we
will find the words Lunga Pausa, A Long Pause, above it. Sometimes not. Think
freely” (Bartnicki 2014, 388).
This injunction is telling—it is precisely what Bartnicki is doing in what, to
those immersed in the kind of interpretive thinking more traditionally associated
with translators, is a most untranslational way. He concludes:

What’s the time?

Well, it may be the tempo of a waltz: 3/4, three fourths, or three quarts.
Whenever HCE is in the vicinity, the tempo approaches C, the Common 4/4,
the tempo of a march, alla marcia, to pass muster. Now, shall we look at an
example how this could have been encoded by James Joyce? Certainly . . .
THREE QUARKS FOR MUSTER MARK!
Ardite, arditi!
The suite is yours.
Krzysztof Bartnicki
(Bartnicki 2014, 390)

Ownership is conferred on us by one who has assumed authorship from another

author. Yet the ownership that we receive is one requiring completion—another
act of authorship—with the symbolic, linguistic, and textual indeterminacy being
stressed at every juncture.
110 John Kearns
As experiments, Da Capo al Finne and Finnegans _ake are certainly audacious,
in the same way that Joyce’s “competive” translations of Finnegans Wake might
also be seen as audacious or that Finnegans Wake might be seen as an audacious
work in and of itself. Approaches must match the material. In a separate study
of translation published by Bartnicki Fu wojny/The Fu of War, he maintains that
“Tłumaczenie jest kontynuacją wojny innymi środkami”/“translation is a continu-
ation of war by other means” (Bartnicki 2012, n.p.). In many ways, this counters
the notion of translation as bridge building, as neutral, innocent, naïve. The trans-
lator is not neutral, but an active agent in the continuation of the text, and an
agent that problematizes notions of authorship. Nor is he the final agent, with the
reader ultimately complementing the auctorial gesture. In a text as indeterminate
as Finnegans Wake, the communality of this auctorial responsibility is placed
center stage. As such, though Bartnicki’s attention may be focused on authorship,
shared possession of a text, the completion of a text by the reader (or listener), we
would argue that in essence he remains a translator throughout, though his activity
expands the notion of translation vastly. In so doing, he confounds the relation-
ship that we imagine to obtain between translator and author, if we envision that
relationship to be one of master and servant.
Interestingly, this brings us back to Pym. While his formal pragmatic and
process study arguments for according the translator an auctorial status appear
to be somewhat blunt instruments that are confounded by the translation of
avant-garde literature in general (and arguably Finnegans Wake translation in
particular), his assertion that “to say that the translator has authorship is to say
that all authors work translationally” is shown by Bartnicki’s experiments to
be perhaps not quite as mundane as Pym suggests. Moreover, we should also
note that Pym himself regrets the fact that translators cannot be regarded as
authors. Their non-auctorial status is, he suggests, intrinsic to the very definition
of translation:

Our cultures give us a translation form, and that form sets up an operative
distinction between translation and authorship. You are free to modify that
form or disregard it altogether, or replace it with something else you want to
call translation . . . However, I would suggest that the first step . . . should be
to identify the current form and to test its limits empirically.
(Pym 2011, 41)

This is safe ground. Bartnicki is the Polish translator of Finnegans Wake; it is not
necessary to resort to formal pragmatics to know that he is not its author, and this,
as has been shown, is not to deny the act of translation some auctorial status. Yet the
way in which Pym continues is interesting, perhaps counterintuitive considering
what he has argued earlier, and certainly relevant to the consideration here of Da
Capo al Finne and Finnegans _ake:
 Finneganów tren 111
I am nevertheless sorry about the translator’s non-authorship . . . [T]he more
work I do on translation the more I see it as a repressive and misleading insti-
tution. I do not think that the current translation form is a good thing, and I
suspect that a good deal of our problems in literary and cultural theory stem
from people wanting to see translation as a good thing—basically because it
appears to break down the binary oppositions and national borders that mark
the guilty past of literary and cultural studies.
(Pym 2011, 41–2)

In other words, that translation itself posits translators as non-authors is not a posi-
tion that necessarily needs to be defended. Translation may appear to break down
borders between authors and readers, but at the outset it establishes a very clear
creative border between writer and translator, relegating the latter (and reader)
to non-auctorial statuses. Translation may appear to break down intercultural
borders, yet such a conception entails a curiously naïve vision of intercultural
mediation. Mona Baker (whom Pym vehemently disagrees with on the point of
narratives) has been a harsh critic of the oft-heard bridge-building metaphor of
translation, which, she alleges, romanticizes the translator’s activity by depicting
translation as inevitably a force for good. The idea of regarding a translator as a
neutral bridge builder is impossibly naïve and assumes that bridges are always
built for the right reasons: “just as they might allow us to cross over and make
positive contact with a different culture, they also allow invading troops to cross
over and kill, maim and destroy entire populations” (Baker 2005, 9). Both Baker
and Bartnicki see translation as implicated in an ethics of combat—a war contin-
ued by other means. Can translation as a repressive institution be countered? The
translation form may be a form that defines translators in contrast to authors, but
as Pym notes “Happily, translation is not the only form in town” (Pym 2011, 42).
Bartnicki’s experiments in Da Capo al Finne and Finnegans _ake can thus be
seen in a formal context as the extension, by a translator, of new formal challenges
to ossified models of mediation.

Notes
1 This translation was of the opening and closing pages of “Anna Livia Plurabelle” and
appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française (May 1931). The original version had been
translated by Alfred Péron and Samuel Beckett and this, according to O’Neill (2013),
was reworked and extended by Paul Léon, Eugène Jolas and Yvan Goll, under Joyce’s
supervision; this was then further reworked by Joyce, Léon, and Philippe Soupault and
was finally revised by Jolas and Adrienne Monnier (O’Neill 2013, 14–15, Beckett,
Péron et al. 1931).
2 Testament to this effort is the fact that Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, had only
been translated in its entirety seven times by 2013 (when Patrick O’Neill published
his survey of translations, including Bartnicki’s translation, which appeared too late for
O’Neill to consider. O’Neill also notes that a second Japanese translation was scheduled
112 John Kearns
for publication in 2012). The dearth of full translations is remarkable when one considers
the exalted position the work occupies in the twentieth-century Western literary canon.
3 For a discussion of Adair’s translation, particularly with reference to how constraint can
be enabling rather than disabling, see Hofstadter 1997. It is worth noting that La dispari-
tion has also been translated in unpublished editions by Ian Monk, John Lee, and Julian
West (Saperstein 2010).
4 This is the title quoted on the spine of the book and used by Bartnicki in his correspon-
dence with me. The title as presented on the cover, title page and front matter is Da Capo
al Fin♫e.
5 In Poland, similar to Germany and many other European countries, “H” corresponds to
what in Anglo-Saxon cultures is “B natural,” with “B” standing for A♯/B♭.
6 The translation is Bartnicki’s own, with some of my own minor revisions, from an MSS
sent to me, personal correspondence.
7 Bartnicki’s Soundcloud page can be found at https://soundcloud.com/gimcbart (last
accessed 23 January 2016).
8 Of course, another angle on the matter of Joyce and authorship is provided by the
famously litigious Joyce estate, executed by Joyce’s grandson Stephen Joyce. Both Da
Capo al Finne and Finnegans _ake appeared after Joyce had (for the second time) come
out of copyright in Europe—prior to that it is highly unlikely that they would have been
published. The Joyce estate was among the most possessive estates of any twentieth-
century Anglophone author with regard to copyright and reproduction rights, so the
issues of authorship posed by these two books could possibly be seen as a kind of wry
commentary on the legal tactics that had been employed by Joyce’s descendant up to
2012.

References
Baker, Mona. “Narratives in and of Translation.” SKASE Journal of Translation and
Interpretation 1.1 (2005): 4–13. Web. 23 Jan 2016.
Bartnicki, Krzysztof, ed. Fu wojny albo tłumacz w wyprawie na wschód. Kraków:
Korporacja Ha!art, 2012. Print.
–––. Da Capo al Finne. Warsaw: Sowa, 2012. Print.
Beckett, Samuel. “Dante . . . Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.” Our Exagmination Round His Factification
for Incamination of Work in Progress. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Eco, Umberto. “Ostrigotta, ora capesco.” Anna Livia Plurabelle di James Joyce. Ed. Rosa
Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli. Trans. Samuel Beckett and others, Nino Frank and James
Joyce. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. v–xxix. Print.
–––. Experiences in Translation. Trans. Alastair McEwen. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2001. Print.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. Rev. ed. of 1959 ed. New York: Oxford University Press,
1982. Print.
Hofstadter, Douglas. Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. New
York: Basic Books, 1997. Print.
Immonen, Sini. “Translation as a Writing Process: Pauses in Translation versus Monolingual
Text Production.” Target 18.2 (2006): 313–35. Print.
Jackson, Kevin. “As Easy as ABC.” The Independent. June 6 1994. Web. 1 February 2016.
Jensen, Astrid. The Effects of Time on Cognitive Processes and Strategies in Translation.
Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School, Faculty of Modern Languages. Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, 2001.
Joyce, James. “Anna Livie Plurabelle.” Trans. Beckett, Samuel, Alfred Péron, Yvan Goll,
Eugène Jolas, Paul Léon, Adrienne Monnier, Philippe Soupault, and James Joyce.
 Finneganów tren 113
Nouvelle Revue Française 19. 212 (1931): 633–46. Reprinted in Bosinelli, Rosa Maria
Bollettieri, ed. Anna Livia Plurabelle di James Joyce. Trans. by Samuel Beckett and
others, Nino Frank and James Joyce. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Print.
–––. “Anna Livia Plurabelle.” Trans. C.K. Ogden [intralingual translation into Basic
English]. transition 21 (1932): 259–62. Reprinted in Bosinelli, 141–50. Print.
–––. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber & Faber, 1939. Print.
–––. Finneganów tren. Trans. Krzysztof Bartnicki. Kraków: Korporacja Ha!art/Liberatura,
2012. Print.
–––. Finnegans _ake: Suite in the Key of Ш (1939). Arr. Krzysztof Bartnicki. Warsaw:
Sowa, 2014. Print.
O’Neill, Patrick. Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2013. Print.
Perec, Georges. A Void. Trans. Gilbert Adair. London: HarperCollins, 1994. Print.
Pym, Anthony. “The Translator as Non-Author, and I am Sorry about That.” The Translator
as Author: Perspectives on Literary Translation. Eds. Claudia Buffagni, Beatrice
Garzelli, and Serenella Zanotti. 31–44. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011. Print.
Saperstein Frug, Stephen (2010) “On the Vanished Translations of Georges Perec’s La
disparition.” N.p. 2010. Web. 1 February 2016.
Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Rev. ed. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2012. Print.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and
New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.
Weaver, Jack W. Joyce’s Music and Noise: Theme and Variation in His Writings.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Print.
Index

A Alba 63 Bartnicki, Krzysztof v, vi, 8, 96–113; Da

Aaltonen, Sirkku 49, 58 Capo al Finne v, vi, 8, 96, 102–106,
A Batalha 63, 67, 78 108, 110, 111, 112f, 112; F_nnegans
ABC 63, 67 _a_e 105; Finnegans _ake v, vi, 8, 96,
ACLA State of the Discipline Report 80 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112f, 113; Fu
Adair, Gilbert 101, 112, 113 wojny / The Fu of War 110, 112
África Magazine 63 Bassnett, Susan 2, 49, 59
Agência Editorial Brasileira 73 Becerra, Concha Linares 73
Aitkin, Martin 5, 11 Beckett, Samuel 6, 97, 100, 111f, 112, 113
Ali, Sabahattin v, x, 6, 7, 32–46; The Devil Bellos, David 1, 2
Within Us 33; The Madonna in the Fur Benjamin, Walter 2, 18, 30, 45, 80;
Coat / Kürk Mantolu Madonna x, 6, Arcades Project 18, 30
32–46; Yusuf from Kuyucak 33 Benton, Joel 20, 21, 29
Allan, Marcel 73 Berman, Antoine 1, 3, 8, 9, 11
Ambrosi, Paula 49 Bierstadt, Oscar 20
Anderson, Mark 25 Bigliazzi, Silvia 49, 59, 60
Angelaki, Vicky 50, 51, 52, 56, 57, 58; Bindervoet, Erik 105
The Plays of Martin Crimp 51, 58 Birgi, Ute 42, 45
Angel-Perez, Elisabeth 58 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine v, 7,
Anster, John 85 80, 85–9, 91, 93f, 94, 95
Apocalypse Now 103 Blixen, Karen 82; Gengældelsens Veje 82
Appiah, Anthony 27 Boethius 62, 78; The Consolation of
Apter, Emily 1, 2, 11, 27, 30, 80, 81, 94 Philosophy 62, 78
Aragay, Mireia 50, 54, 58, 59 Bondy, Luc 55
Archipelago Books 5 Bourdieu, Pierre 4
Arndt, Fritz 36 Brando, Marlon 103
Arnold, Matthew 72, 78 Brecht, Bertolt 51; The Jewish Wife 51
Ataç, Nurullah 35, 45f Brieba, Constanza 50
Auden, W.H. 21, 22, 23, 29 Brodie, Geraldine 7
Austen, Jane 4, 78 Brownjohn, John 17, 24, 30
Aytürk, İlker 35, 45 Bruckner, Ferdinand 51; Pains of Youth 51
Burwick, Frederick 84, 94
Baer, Brian 3, 4
Baker, Mona 2, 95, 111, 112 Capriolo, Ettore 99
Bakhtin, Mikhail 37, 38, 45; Art and Carlyle, Thomas v, x, 8, 80, 89–92, 93f,
Answerability 38, 45 94, 95; Sartor Resartus 8, 89–95, 93f,
Barry, Joseph A. 21 94f
Barthes, Roland 8, 76, 78, 98, 99 Casanova, Pascale 14
Bartlett, Don 5, 10f, 11 Celan, Paul 25, 26, 29
 Index 115
Cervantes, Miguel de 29, 80, 81, 94; Don Eliot, George 73
Quixote 22, 80, 90 Ellman, Richard 97, 112
Chalmers, Martin 18, 30 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 90
Chamoiseau, Patrick 25, 26, 30 English Stage Company 50
Chekhov, Anton 51; The Seagull 51 Erhat, Azra 36
Christie, Will 91, 94f, 94 Escoda, Clara 50, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59
Civilização 63, 67 Etland, Howard 18, 30
Clements, Rachel 51, 52, 59 Eugenides, Jeffrey 5, 10f, 11, 19, 26,
Coetzee, J.M. ix, 68, 69, 78 30
Coffee House Press 5 Europa Editions 5
Collins, Wilkie 67, 73 Everett, A.H. 90
Cooper, Rand Richard 27, 29
Coverdale, Linda 25, 30 Fanon, Frantz 62, 64, 72, 78
Crimp, Martin v, ix, 7, 47–60; Attempts Ferrante, Elena 4, 5, 10f; The Story of
on Her Life 51, 56; Cruel and Tender the Lost Child / Storia della bambina
51; Die Stadt 53, 59; La Ciudad 50; La perduta 5
Ciutat 50; La Ville 50, 53, 59; The City Ferreira, Leyguarda 74, 78
47, 7, 47–60; The Country 55–7, 59; The Fielding, Henry 73
Misanthrope 51 Fifty Modern and Contemporary
Cullen, John 5 Dramatists 51, 59
Cusk, Rachel 5 Foreman, Amanda 16, 30
Fornés, María Irene 48, 59; The Summer in
Dahlberg, Edward 21, 29 Gossensass 48, 59
Dal, Güney 32 Foucault, Michel 24, 25, 30, 98, 99
Damrosch, David 2, 11 Fox, Charles 82, 89
Dantas, Luís 67, 78 Frank, Nino 97, 112, 113
Daoud, Kamal 5 Frankel, Max 18, 30
Dekkers, Midas 27, 30 Fraser’s Magazine 89–91, 93f, 95
Derrida, Jacques ix, 2, 11, 58; Of Friel, Brian 48; Translations 48
Grammatology 2, 11 Frost, Robert 26
Devi, Mahasweta 2 Fukuyama, Francis 17, 31
Devine, George 50
Dickens, Charles 7, 67, 73–6, 77f, 78; The Garcia, José Luís 61, 63, 64, 78
Mystery of Edwin Drood 7, 74, 78 Geoffrey of Monmouth 80; Historia
Dickinson, Kristin 32, 33, 41, 46 Regum Britanniae 80
Dix, Len 5 Gifford, William 86, 88
Djian, Philippe 50, 53, 55, 56, 59; 37,2º le Gillies, Robert Pearse 85, 89
Matin / Betty Blue 55 Gilmore, Harry 27
Domingues, Mário v, 7, 61–79; A Audácia Gilroy, Harry 23, 29
de um Tímid 65; Delicioso Pecado 65; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 85–7; Faust
Entre Vinhedos e Pomares 65; Hugo, 85
o Pintor 65; O menino entre gigantes / Goffman, Erving 98
The Boy Amongst Giants 63, 68, 77f, 78; Goldstein, Ann 5, 10f
O Preto de Charleston 65 Goldstein, Brigitte 17, 30
Dousterswivel, Jacob v, 80, 84–6, 91, Gombrowicz, Witold 26, 30; Ferdydurke
92, 94, 95; Inquiry into the Theory of 26, 30
Imposture 85, 94; Theorie der Betrug Gorra, Michael 18, 24, 30
86, 91, 92 Gramling, David 6
Drakulić, Slavenka 27, 29 Grandage, Michael 59
Dresser, Richard 55 Grass, Günther 17, 30; Too Far Afield 17,
30
Eco, Umberto 97, 109, 112 Gray, Julie 16, 30
Eder, Richard 18, 26, 27, 29, 30 Gray, Philip 67, 70
Editorial Dois Continentes 73 Grillparzer, Franz 85
116 Index
Habermas, Jürgen 98
Halkett, Elizabeth 85; “Hardyknute” 85
Hall, Stuart 62, 63, 68, 78
Hamilton, Elizabeth 82, 93f; Translation
of the Letters from a Hindoo Rajah 82
Handbook of Translation Studies 81, 95
Handke, Peter x, 19, 30, 53; Nachmittag
eines Schriftstellers 53; On a Dark
Night I Left My Silent House 19, 30
Hardwick, Lorna 51, 59
Harman, Mark 9
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 81
Heart of Darkness 103
Heim, Michael Henry 9, 11
Henkes, Robbert-Jan 105
Hepkaner, İlker 6
Herder, Johann Gottfried 86, 88
Higgins, David 87, 94
Hikmet, Nazim 34
Hoffman, Michael 18, 26, 27, 30
Hoffmann, E.T.A. 86; Die Elixiere des
Teufels 86
Hogg, James 85; The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner 85; The
Queen’s Wake 85
Homer 44, 88
Houellebecq, Michel 5, 6, 10f, 11;
Submission / Soumission 5, 10f, 11
Hume, David 88, 89
Huysmans, Joris-Karl 6
Ibsen, Henrik 48, 55; Hedda Gabler 48;
John Gabriel Borkman 55
Ibsen, Sigurd 55
Igarashi, Hitoshi 99
Ilustração 63, 67
Immonen, Sini 98, 112
Irving, Washington 81
Isenberg, Noah 17, 30
Ivic, Marko 27, 29
James, Henry 40
Janeway, Carol Brown 26, 30
Jeffrey, Francis 86, 88, 89, 91
Jenn, Ronald 81, 82, 93f, 94
Jensen, Astrid 98, 99, 112
Jesenská, Milena 9
Joris, Pierre 25, 29
Joyce, James 8, 96–113; “Anna Livia
Plurabelle” 96, 97, 111f, 112, 113;
Finneganów tren v, 8, 96, 100–102,
113; Finnegans Wake 8, 96, 97, 99, 100,
101, 103, 105–107, 110, 111f, 113
Joyce, Stephen 112f
Kafka, Franz 9, 10, 11, 17; “Das Urteil” 9;
“Metamorphosis” 17; “Soud” 9; “The
Judgment” 9
Kaminka, Ika 6
Kane, Sarah 55
Karasu, Bilge 32, 41, 45, 46
Kearns, John 8
Keaton, Buster 6
Kemal, Mustafa 6, 33, 34
Klemperer, Viktor 18, 30; I Will Bear
Witness 18, 30
Knausgaard, Karl Ove 4–6, 10f, 11; My
Struggle: Book 4 / Min Kamp 5, 10f,
11
Kofler, Peter 49, 59, 60
Körner, Theodor 85
Korporacja Ha!Art 100, 112, 113
Krusoe, Jim 5, 11
Kundera, Milan 9, 10, 11; The Unbearable
Lightness of Being / Nesnesitelná
lehkost bytí 9, 11
Kussi, Peter 9
Lacan, Jacques 107, 109
Lalami, Laila 5
Lebert, Benjamin 18, 26; Crazy 18, 30
Lee, Mabel 27, 29
Lennon, Brian 12, 27, 31
Le Rougor, Gustave 73
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 86, 88; Nathan
der Weise 86
Lever, Evelyne 16, 30; The Last Queen of
France 16, 30
Levin, Harry 15, 22, 29
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 17, 31
Levý, Jiří 49, 59
Liberatura 100, 113
Lispector, Clarice 5
Livraria Civilização 73
Livraria Figueirinhas 73
Lockhart, John Gibson 85–8, 91, 92, 93f,
94
Lopes, Alexandra 7
Luiselli, Valeria 5, 10f, 11; The Story of
My Teeth / Historia de mis dientes 5,
10f, 11
Macpherson, James 85; “Ossian” 85
MacSweeney, Christine 5, 11
Mahlsdorf, Charlotte von 19
Makïne, Andrei 19; Confessions of a
Fallen Standard-Bearer 19
Manguel, Alberto 25, 26, 30
Maristed, Kai 19, 30; Broken Ground 19
 Index 117
Maron, Monica 17, 30; Animal Triste 17, Patrick, J.C. 25
30 Perec, Georges 101, 113; La disparition
Marques, Gentil 74, 78 101, 112f, 113
Matsuda, Paul Kai 44, 46 Péron, Alfred 97, 111f, 112
Mayenburg, Marius von 50, 55, 56, 59, 60; Perteghella, Manuela 49, 60
The Stone 56; The Ugly One 56 Peyre, Henri 15
McCann, Colm 4 Pinter, Harold 55, 59; The Homecoming
McLaughlin, Kevin 18, 30 55, 59
Mendelsohn, Daniel 24, 30 Pirandello, Luigi 54; Six Characters in
Messud, Claire 5 Search of an Author 54
Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary Pitt, William 89
British Playwrights 51, 60 Pool, Gail 13, 31
Middeke, Martin 47, 50, 51, 58, 60 Popovič, Anton 81
Miller, James 18, 30 Poulton, Mike 59
Mitchell, Katie 50, 59 Primeiro de Janeiro 63, 67
Monforte, Enric 50, 58, 59 Putnam, Ruth 20, 28
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Putnam, Samuel 22, 29
Baron de 80; Lettres persanes 80 Pye, Michael 25, 30
Moor de, Margriet 16, 30; Virtuoso 16, 30 Pym, Anthony 3, 7, 8, 11, 98–100, 110,
Moore, Thomas 89 111, 113
Motte Fouqué de la, Baron and Baroness
85 Rath, Brigitte 80, 81, 95
Mueenuddin, Daniyal 4 Rattigan, Terrence 5
Müller, Herta 4 Ratushinskaya, Irina 19; Fiction and Lies
Müllner, Adolphus 85 19
Muñoz i Calafell, Victor 50 Raupach, Ernst 85
Murakami, Haruki 6 Ravenhill, Mark 50; The Cut / Der Schnitt
50
Nabokov, Vladimir 27 Rebellato, Dan 51
Napoleon 88, 89 Reiss, Katharina 13, 31
Nesin, Aziz 99 Rilke, Ina 16, 30
New Directions 5 Robinson, Douglas 1, 11, 81, 95
Notícias de Lourenço Marques 63, 67 Rohde, Erwin 36
Notícias Ilustrado 64, 67, 78 Romano Torres 73, 74, 77f; Selected
NYRB Classics 5 Works by Selected Authors 73
Rose, Danis 105
O Detective 63 Rosen, Jonathan 26, 30
Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe 55 Roth, Joseph 18, 27, 30; The Wandering
Ogden, C.K. 96, 113 Jews 18, 30
O’Hanlon, John 105 Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation
O’Neill, Eugene 55 Studies 88, 95
O’Neill, Patrick 96, 97, 99, 100, 111f, 113; Royal Court Theatre 50, 59
Impossible Joyce: Finnegans Wakes 96, Rushdie, Salman 63, 70, 72, 78, 99
113 Russett, Margaret 82, 84, 85, 95
Ören, Aras 32
O Repórter X 63, 67 Said, Edward 24, 25, 30
Ostermeier, Thomas 50, 55 Scalia, Christopher 86, 91, 95
O’Sullivan, Carol 81, 95 Schaubühne Theatre 50, 60
Other Press 5 Schiller, Friedrich 59, 86; Don Carlos
Oxford Companion to English Literature 59
51 Schillinger, Liesl 4, 10f, 11
Oxford Companion to Theatre and Schlegel, Friedrich von 86, 87, 91;
Performance 51, 59 Lectures on the History of Literature 86;
Özdamar, Emine Sevgi 32 Philosophische Vorlesungen 91
118 Index
Schneider, Peter 17, 24, 30; Eduard’s
Homecoming 17–18, 30
Schultze, Ingo 18, 29; Simple Stories 18,
29
Scott, Walter 67, 73, 82–5, 89, 94, 95;
Ivanhoe 84; The Betrothed 84, 95
Sewall, Frank 20, 29
Shakespeare, William 48, 55, 88; Henry
V 48
Sheehan, James J. 17, 30
Sierz, Aleks 50, 51, 59, 60; The Theatre of
Martin Crimp 51, 60
Simmel, Georg 62, 68, 71, 77, 78
Sophocles 51; Trachiniae 51
Southey, Robert 82, 83, 89, 93f, 94;
Letters from England 82, 83, 94
Souvestre, Pierre 73
Spitzer, Leo 36
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 1, 2, 6,
11
Stein, Lorin 6, 10f, 11
Steiner, George 3, 61, 79
Strauss, Botho 51; Big and Small 51
Sun Newspaper 91
Syha, Ulrike 55
Szabo, Magda 5
Tabucchi, Antonio 25; The Missing Head
of Damasceno Monteiri 25
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 90, 95
Temerson, Catherine 16, 30
The Atlantic Monthly 5
The Book of Mormon 82
The Edinburgh Review 85–7, 91, 93f, 94f,
94
The Empire Strikes Back 104
The Godfather 103
The Literary Gazette of Walladmor 82
The New York Times 3–5, 11, 13, 18, 21,
23
The Paris Review 5, 6, 11
The Quarterly Review 86, 87
Theroux, Marcel 4
Thomas, Lionel 84, 95
Three Percent blog 6
Tomlin, Liz 50, 54, 60
Toremans, Tom 7, 8
Toury, Gideon 66, 71, 79, 82, 83, 95, 97,
113; Descriptive Translation Studies
and Beyond 79, 82, 95, 113
Twain, Mark 81, 94
Tymoczko, Maria 28, 31; Enlarging
Translation, Empowering Translators
28
Uşakligil, Halid Ziya 39; Mai ve Siyah /
Blue and Black 39
Valéry, Paul 35; Mauvaises pensées et
autres 35
Venuti, Lawrence 2, 7, 27, 28, 31, 35,
65–7, 72, 74, 76, 79, 97, 101, 113; The
Translator’s Invisibility 28, 79, 98, 101,
113
Voltaire 89
Walladmor: Frei nach dem Englischen des
Walter Scott, von W****s 83, 84, 93,
94, 95
Walpole, Horace 82; The Castle of Otranto
82
Weaver, Jack W. 106, 108, 113
Wheatley, Kim 87, 95
Williams, John 104; “Imperial March” /
“Darth Vader Theme” 104
Wilson, John 85, 89
Winston, Krishna 17, 19, 30
Wood, Sharon 54, 60
Woods, John L. 18, 29
Wordsworth, William 89; Lyrical Ballads
82
World Literature Today 5
Wright, Doug 19; I Am My Own Wife 19
Xingjian, Gao 26, 29
Yapi Kredi Publishing House 41
Yeltsyn, Boris 19; Midnight Diaries 19
Yücel, Hasan Ali 35, 36; Dünya
Edebiyatindan Tercümeler 36
Zaimoglu, Feridun 32
Zielinska-Elliott, Anna 6
Zucker, Alex 6