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Literary Review
PERSPECTIVES
Gained in translation
HIMANSU S. MOHAPATRA
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An engaging study of the themes that constitute the hotly contested but booming field of translation studies.
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In Translation: Reflections, Refractions, Transformations, edited by Paul St-Pierre and Prafulla C. Kar, John Benjamins, 2007, p.313, $149.
This edited volume on the subject of translation is of immense value for the general reader as well as the specialist. It gives the former, especially through Paul St-Pierre’s lucid, informative and stimulating introduction, a helpful overview of the subject. It also caters to the specialist through its 21 crisply written essays from experts in the field that the editors have helpfully distributed under four sections. The outcome is an impressive orchestration of themes and sub-themes that comprise the burgeoning, though hotly contested, discipline of translation studies.
The title of the volume catches the sense of the discipline’s coming of age following the “translative turn”. It is indicated by the dropping of “lost” in the familiar expression “lost in translation.” And the subtitle presents in shorthand form a synoptic view of the three-fold conceptualisation of translation in our culture, namely “reflection”, “refraction” and “transformation”. It is the last that is the resting point, at least for the time being, for translators and translation theorists assembled within the book’s covers. There is also a pervasive questioning of translation’s role and function.
Daniel Simeoni stresses in the opening essay the “cognitive confinement” of translation. This diagnosis, together with the inescapable copyright laws that jealously guard the “seeds” of the original, shows that all is not well with translation. Rajendra Singh questions the aspirations of the field to autonomy in the wake of its severance of its links with linguistics, its natural medium and habitat. And Harish Trivedi in the closing essay spoofs a contemporary tendency, noticeable among diasporic writers, to use the term translation interchangeably with metropolitan migrancy. Despite these caveats, the project of explaining and defining translation is well underway in the remaining essays in the volume.
The operative concepts of the volume may be listed as follows: the “sociological eye”, “translative writing”, and the political economy of translation. Though stated by Daniel Simeoni, Sherry Simon and Debendra Das and Diptiranjan Pattanaik respectively, these terms do reverberate in the writings of others with whom their essays are clubbed as well as of those outside their group. Simeoni’s thesis about the failure of the discipline to develop a “sociological eye” — thanks to the inherent limitations of the European nationalist thought — is matched on the level of language by R. Anthony Lewis’s essay. Lewis shows how the mainstream translation theory based on the structuralist model blinds it to the intralingual translation that goes on incessantly in non-standard language varieties of the world. Das and Pattanaik sketch an alternative sociology of translation in their exhaustive account of translation in medieval India and Orissa, one that gives substance to Daniel Simeoni’s hunch that the “translatory” practices of the non-Western societies are more engaged with their social and economic matrices. Sherry Simon’s concept of a translative writing in her essay on the Canadian poet Ann Carson finds an echo in Sukanta Chaudhuri’s essay which itself is a rewriting of Benjamin’s notion of the “afterlife” of the text and recent theories of intertextuality.
Reading translation
These general points apart, there are essays which tell us how to read a translation as a text. Here Judith Lavoie’s idea of a “signifying mosaic” is helpful in showing us the parallels between a translation’s aesthetic, ideological and linguistic choices. Lavoie uses it to analyse the case of a 19th century French (mis)appropriation or taming by William-Little Hughes of Mark Twain’s great anti-racist novel Huckleberry Finn.
The standout essay for the present reviewer is, of course, by Mark Fettes on another translational misadventure represented by Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst’s English translation of the works of the almost extinct community of Haida myth tellers. Fettes gives a new meaning to Venuti’s thesis about the “ethnographic violence of translation” by focusing on the potential violation of the ecology of a minority or what he calls a Gemeischaft language through translation into a metropolitan language such as English.
One inevitable final remark: packed with information on and insight into the translation scene in Canada and India and reflecting in its editorial apparatus the partnership between the two countries, the volume marks an important new beginning of an Indo-Canadian joint enterprise in the academic sphere.
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