An Earnest Attempt at a Complex Application of Literary Criticism (Tennant)

I'm currently taking a literary criticism course and went down a mental rabbit hole after Suzanne Jill Levine alluded to Lacan in her section on "Marginality." Already, my mind was straying because of the Viktor Shklovsky epigraph ("New forms in art are created by the canonization of the peripheral form"), which I hadn't come across before and which resonated deeply with me, reminding me of Damion Searls' reference to Shklovsky on Friday and his concept of defamiliarization ("Art exists to make the stone stony"). It occurred to me that the tension between recognition and the lack thereof is central to the claims put forth by all three writers (Shklovsky, Lacan, and Levine). Levine describes translation as a kind of metaphorical process, wherein one "seeks the similar in the dissimilar." She also characterizes it as "a correspondence, a resemblance despite difference." 

Because I attended a lecture on Lacan before reading the assigned readings, I started making connections to his "mirror stage" theory. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, when infants first see themselves in a mirror, they perceive themselves as a coherent, unified whole when, in reality, they are seeing a distorted, idealized image (imago) of their outer selves, which leads to a fundamental sense of alienation between their self-identity and external perceptions throughout life. I think a lot of translation critics get caught up in this idealization or romanticization of the original text and thus close themselves off to the kind of "deferral, diffuseness, plurality, [and] openness" that Levine both practices and celebrates. These critics are often disinterested in subversion and do not engage with the fact that language is hollow, that it already possesses an inherent "infidelity to itself." All relationships between signs are arbitrary (Saussure); meaning is constituted through difference alone (Derrida). Remembering and embracing these theoretical frameworks can actually empower translators to "surrender to the pleasure of suggestion instead of seeking sense" (Levine). Now, I'm sure Nabokov would have a lot to say on that subject, and everything is better in moderation, etc., but I find that one of the most important bonds between an original text and its translations is often overlooked or overshadowed by other criteria, which is the sense of affinity that they share, i.e., the mutual recognition they produce. 

However, I recognize that my complex analogy is treating both texts as parallel forces with equal weight, which I do take issue with, as the original should always be endowed with more meaning. I only wish to applaud the ways in which Levine uses linguistic theory in her essay to "liberate" the constraints to which translators often feel beholden. 

                                                                                                                    Sawyer