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)