Translation as a Mode: Response Paper on Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator

It is difficult to assess Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ without taking into account the reason it was written for, that is, as an introduction to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableux Parisiens. For the first concept that strikes the reader from the very beginning is that art is not intended for its viewers/listeners, and that any form of it, including literature, has an essential substance which cannot be expressed trough words, and above all, it is just ‘for the sake of art’, with no designated, dedicated or even ideal reader. This was exactly the kind of attitude that considered the Functionalist approaches to translation as superfluous and to which scholars like Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiss responded with very solid arguments that any type of writing, even pure aesthetical, has an intended, though granted unconscious sometimes, reader.

But Walter Benjamin was a man of his time and we must not forget that the comparative linguistic approach to translation was the mainstream thinking and it mainly regarded what would Even-Zohar call ‘high literature’.

I would suspect Benjamin constructed this discourse around the prestige of Baudelaire, and perhaps sometimes as a form of excuse if he couldn’t – or thought he wasn’t able to - manage to fully render the multitude of shapes, meanings and artistical expressions the poetry embeds in its form and structure. Such a source-oriented approach holds the case for Antoine Berman as well, who had very strict opinions about what is good and what is bad translation, an approach which would seem somewhat outdated nowadays, when we contextualize translation and take into account a series of sociocultural aspects along with the micro level of the process per se.

Going back to Les fleurs du mal (and it is interesting to see that internet references in English keep the French title almost all the time), Benjamin argues that translation, as a mode, reveals itself to only those worthy of understanding the translability of a work of art, and this translability comes as a natural connection with the original by transcending the boundaries of languages into an ideal, pure form:

While all individual elements of foreign languages – words, sentences, structure – are mutually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions. Without distinguishing the intended object from the mode of intention, no firm grasp of this basic law of a philosophy of language can be achieved. The words Brot and pain ‘intend’ the same object, but the modes of this intention are not the same. (2000:18)

I believe the author is mainly concerned with the semiotic aspect of Baudelaire’s discourse, and he stresses on the importance of distinguishing between various signifiers of the same signified across languages, which carry out infinite and barely perceptible nuances according to every emotional and historical utterance a word may bear. He wants to make sure that the reader fully understands the frisson nouveau, as Victor Hugo put it, of the poems, their sheer expression of the aesthetics of the ugly, and doesn’t fall into the category of those who are shocked by the eroticism and decadence themes, but manage to see beyond the syntactic surface. Benjamin therefore puts a lot of effort in trying to explain how an iconic effect must be achieved when rendering such a high expression of art form, how fidelity can never reproduce the original meaning but carries it on in the afterlife through its image, just like the pieces of a vessel glued together, so that the translation would thus ‘incorporate the original’s mode of signification’ while ‘refraining from wanting to communicate something’ (2000:21).

I would argue that nowadays we would take a more sociological approach when translating Baudelaire, that we would tediously seek every intimate connection between his work and his life, we would want to see how much of his past and personality was embedded in his poems, and therefore search for alternative meanings in connection with his persona and sociocultural background, while striving to reflect all these into translation. No one is to say however that we would be able to do a better job than Benjamin Walter.


References:

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)

Translation as a Violent Act: Response Paper on Antoine Berman's Translation and the Trials of the Foreign

Antoine Berman argues in his paper, Translation and the Trials of the Foreign, that a shift has occurred throughout time in translation approaches, from foreignization towards naturalization, and that the properly ethical aim of translation is receiving the Foreign as a ‘foreign’ (2000:285). He takes a rather radical attitude on translation practices and views the methods used as ‘textual deformations’ (2000:286), deviations from the ‘essential aim’, doomed to produce ethnocentric and annexationist target texts, unable to reflect the original’s spirit.

It seems to me that for Berman translation is a ‘second-hand’ activity; he is determined to prove that the readers’ perception of translation ‘not being a true text’ (2000:294), but a poor imitation is based on solid grounds. The examples he gives as ‘deforming tendencies’ when rendering from a source-text, they all show how the original text is inevitably damaged, and how rationalization destroys the ‘polylogism of language’, or how expansion increases the mass of text without adding value to it. Thinks may not be that clear-cut however. As Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier argue, the assumption that ‘the act of translation is by nature less creative than the act of writing an original work’ (1999:1) is not doing anyone any favor. The translator is in a sense bond to the source-text, he has a duty to write in relation with it, but in the same time he has a duty towards the target audience as well, and he must find a middle way out between the constraints of the original and those of the language he renders into, in order to produce a text that would lay out the originality and beauty of the source text while not distracting the reader with too much syntactic and semantic peculiarity. Moreover, where Berman sees ‘deformation’ in translation, procedures which irreversibly alter the original thought like expansion, explicitation, and clarification, other scholars see strategies, tools used - whether consciously or not - to help the translator to best represent the source-text. Lefevere (1992:107) for example, refers to concepts like allusion (use of cultural allusion to establish cultural color even if it doesn’t exist in the original), explicitation (smuggling explanations into the target text because the translators ‘take very seriously their task as mediators between the original and its new readership’), or compensation (adding features that do not match in the original to establish a balance). While he depicts and analyses these strategies in various translations of Catullus’s thirty-second poem he shows how throughout time the translators have used different solutions which, among others, reflected the poetics and the ideology of the time. So these translations may not have accurately represented Catullus in all its expressiveness, stylistic features and spirit of the time, but this is most of the times an inevitable result of the linguistic structure of every language and of the change in social behavior and mentality in time. Who is to say these translations are not standing out as equally valuable works as their originals?

I would argue that Berman’s approach to literature, and therefore, translation, is somewhat elitist and source-oriented. The novel may be perhaps considered a lower form of literature in some cultures, but this is definitely not the case in many others (e.g. USA). Moreover, it is very subjective to argue that a translation of Hölderlin, for example, ‘has been massacred’. While I completely subscribe to the idea that foreignization enriches the target culture with insights from the source, a complete alienation of the target text would lose touch with the readers, for a sort of mediator must still exist in order to ‘move’ the audience towards the author. Especially in our era, whether we like it or not, there is a general tendency toward the so-called ‘fluent reading’, which I believe exists not only in English, but in other languages as well. I’ve noticed how difficult is to follow an English translation from Turkish full of cultural markers like ‘kısmet’, ‘inşallah’, ‘meyhane’, ‘rakı’, and so on and so forth. It is, as I said before, enriching to keep some of them in the text and give a glimpse of the ‘Turkish world’ to the foreign reader. But, as I’ve seen it with the translations of Orhan Pamuk, I would argue it is a shame that the translator sacrificed the fluency of the text that would keep a reader’s interest high for the sake of the ‘foreignness’. And there is another issue that concerns me with respect to foreignness. Apparently this is a desired feature when it comes to Turkish into English translations, but what about the other way around? Is it common to ‘foreignize’ in literary translations, do Turkish readers want to see unusual sentence constructions and calques, with their following explanation as a footnote or in a glossary? Or in non-literary renderings, do they perceive the use of borrowings as threatening to the integrity of the language and therefore dismiss them and call for a ‘naturalizing’ translation? These things should be carefully analyzed and only then a rough conclusion should be drawn, not necessarily on what the translation theories corpora (sometimes unintentionally) prescribe, but on what the readers of the target culture feel it suits best their preferences and needs. Together with, I might add, a certain cohesion on the strategies and attitudes used both for incoming and outcoming translations for the same language.


References:

Antoine Berman, ‘Translation and the Trials of the Foreign’, published in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venutti (Routledge, 2000)

Michael Holman and Jean Boase-Beier, The Practices of Literary Translation: Constraints and Creativity (Manchester: St. Jerome, 1999)

Andre Lefevere, Translation Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (NY:MLA, 1992)

Andre Lefevere and the Concept of Rewriting

Andre Lefevere’s systemic approach to translation introduces the concept of rewriting as a form of reproducing a text, be it in the same language or not, in a written or oral form. He addresses his paper to ‘those in the middle’, who are responsible for shaping the reception of literature by the non-professional readers (1992:1). In this process several social actors like translators, reviewers, patrons or publishing houses are involved in the re-creation – rewriting - of a source-text into a target-text which thus becomes a refraction of the original.

What does ‘rewriting’ exactly mean for Lefevere? It appears to be that ‘final product’ which, during the process of translation is passed through the filter of the poetics and the ideology of the time in a certain sociocultural space. As he argues, ‘rewriters create images of a writer, a work, a period, a genre, sometimes even a whole literature’ (1992:5), that is, by manipulating textual or cultural aspects of a literary work they project it differently, refracted, into the target culture. Rewriting does not necessarily happen only between two languages, it can take place within the same literary system, and he gives many examples, one of them being the case of Heinrich Heine, whose work, ‘Loreley’, was published as anonymous in an German anthology from the first half of the 20th century, because he ‘betrayed’ his country by showing his affiliation towards France.

It is true that the status of 'Loreley' changed, or, to put it in Lefevere’s words, was refracted, and had therefore different angles of reception throughout time, but in the end, once Heine’s genius was understood and acknowledged, it received the deserved consideration, which I suppose it will remain unchanged from now on. What I want to point out is that, even if in a certain period of time certain social agents ‘play’ with the texts and use them as power or manipulation tools, or just as mediums to reflect the poetics of the time, eventually history will expose them and restore them to their real – or what it is believed to be their real, original – meaning. After all, all the examples given by Lefevere in his papers, from Catullus’s poems to Heine’s 'Loreley' are set to prove these types of exposures.

One could argue that it is impossible to determine what the original meaning of a work is, and that history is not a type of ultimate authority which holds the incontestable truth. Nevertheless, since we are bond to judge thing only retrospectively and we can only make presuppositions about the future, we generally tend to agree or accept whatever is proved to be real or original the way we understand it in our own time. So if, let’s say, the Bible was ‘rewritten’ in a certain way, so that it would fit with the dogma of the first Christians, today’s society maybe wouldn’t be able or willing to accept this fact, but perhaps 500 years from now people will have the tools and the mentality necessary to reveal the ‘refractions’ and how they influenced the Christian world throughout time.

I would have to admit that to a certain extent the idea of having such a holistic concept of time and history is abstract and unrealistic; we can still, however, regard the concept of translation as ‘rewriting’ to various literary or social contexts in relation with smaller time slots. I believe the translations of 'Dracula' within the Turkish literary system (Tahir Gürçağlar, 2009) are a good example of rewriting in Lefevere’s view: the first translation, 1928, had the author concealed and it reflected (or better said, refracted into) the intention ‘to evoke nationalist feelings in the readership’ ; the last one, from 1998, ‘restored’ the text to its original writer, Bram Stoker, and had the nationalist parts removed. We can assess these decisions both from the ideological and the public reception perspective. So we may agree that the patrons and the professional readers sometimes seek to impose or insinuate their own ideas on the society, but ultimately the society is the one which decides, even a posteriori, to reject what is considered to be deviated from an original text and to erase or correct the refractions.


References:

Andre Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, Routledge , 1992

Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar, Scouting the Borders of Translation: Pseudotranslation, Concealed Translations and Authorship in Twentieth Century Turkey, 2009