Abstract
In 1923, the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin published his translation into German of Baudelaire’s Tableaux parisiens. As an introduction to this volume, he included a probing and deeply felt essay, entided “Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers,” or “The Task of the Translator,” in which he attempts to define the proper approach toward the rendering of a literary work from one language into another. In the course of his discussion, he makes the rather startling and, in the end, metaphysical claim that,
Translation… ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages. It cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationship itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in an embryonic or intensive form. This representation of hidden significance through an embryonic attempt at making it visible is of so singular a nature that it is rarely met with in the sphere of nonlinguistic life.
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Notes
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 72.
For more details of this debate, see Paul de Man, “ ‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator’ ” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 73–105
Jacques Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel,” trans. Joseph F. Graham, in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 165–207.
See also Maurice Blanchot, “Translating” (1971), trans. Richard Sieburth, Sulfur 26: 82–86.
Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 232.
For an enlightening explication of this tradition, which finds its greatest flowering during the Romantic period, including such seminal figures as Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, von Humboldt, and Schleiermacher, see Antoine Berman, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, trans. S. Heyvaert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984).
See Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets, ed. Sally Purcell (London: Anvil Press, 1981).
As cited in George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 256.
For an illuminating history of Anglo-American translation that traces the establishment of transparent rendering, or “fluency,” as the dominant ideology for translation, see Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), especially Chapter 2, pp. 43–98.
In an interview with Donald Hall, Paris Review, 1961. As cited in The Marianne Moore Reader (New York: Viking, 1961), p. 263.
For a thoroughly researched and historically nuanced account of this aspect of Modernism, see Mark S. Morrison, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).
From the Preface to Eliot’s translation, Anabasis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), p. 10.
Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 149.
See Richard Reid, Discontinuous Gods: Ezra Pound and the Epic of Translation. Ph. D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1986.
Williams Carlos Williams, The Collected Poetry of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 2, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), p. 198.
Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
Fritz Senn, Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 38.
Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 58.
W. B. Yeats, Explorations (London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1962), p. 3.
From “The Life of Lucian,” in John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, Vol. 2, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1962).
Matthew Arnold, “On Translating Homer,” in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1961), p. 218.
As cited in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959, revised edition 1983), p. 178.
See J. P. Sullivan, Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative Translation (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1964).
See Wai-lim Yip, Ezra Pound’s Cathay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).
André Lefévere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 96–97.
For a useful survey of recent theories of translation, see Edwin Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
For other works that include an expressly historical view of translation, see for example Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991)
Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
For a controversial recent attempt to define an ethics of translation, see Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
For an extremely charged, though ultimately problematic, discussion of translation in a colonial frame, see T. Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Poststructuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992).
Also see Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
For a discussion that combines ethical concerns with an expressly post-colonial perspective, see Gayatri Spivak, “The Politics of Translation” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 179–200.
See Lori Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” in Lawrence Venuti, ed., Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London and New York: Roudedge, 1992).
For further discussion specifically concerning issues of gender and Bible translation, see E. Castelli, “Les Belles Infidèles”/ “Fidelity or Feminism?,” Special Section on Feminist Translation of the New Testament, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, pp. 25–39, 1990
E. S. Fiorenza, “Charting the Field of Feminist Bible Interpretation,” in But She Said: Feminist Practices of Bible Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
For additional discussion of this metaphor and its relation to heteronormative conceptions of gender and sexuality, see Barbara Johnson, “Taking Fidelity Philosophically,” in Joseph F. Graham, ed., Difference in Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), especially Chapter 3, “Nation,” pp. 99–147.
See Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures (Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1996).
For a series of essays on translation in an explicidy Derridean mode, see Joseph F. Graham, ed. Difference in Translation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
T. E. Hulme, “A Lecture on Modern Poetry,” in Further Speculations, ed. Samuel Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), p. 69.
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© 2002 Steven G. Yao
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Yao, S.G. (2002). Introduction: “every allegedly great age” Modernism and the Practice of Literary Translation. In: Translation and the Languages of Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05979-6_1
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