A few things strike me about “Loaf or Hot Water Bottle.” The first was, having read this right after submitting a short story for workshop (that admittedly came together rather quickly), I felt, while reading this, a surge of writerly guilt. In this piece, Lydia Davis outlines an elaborate decision tree for translating Proust’s fiction—a compendium of meticulous ways to go about preserving syntax, meaning, sentence structure, sound—even punctuation. There is an almost scientific rigor to her approach that felt different from mine (or at least, what I’ve been doing over the past few weeks)—but also very different from my writing process, which is fast and loose—intentional at the conceptual level, but less so at the level of, say, punctuation. I’m curious how this approach has influenced Lydia Davis’s writing process, and if my own writing could benefit from periodically editing it more like a translator.
At the same time, I had this existential thought: is the project of performing a close translation ever fully satisfying? I’m not quite sure how to articulate this, but it feels like there might be something inherently frustrating about following such an exacting process that will never bear an exact thing; a translation is always slipping out of its original shape. On this note, I loved the analogy in 19 Ways of Looking at Wei: that the relationship between source text and translation is like a parent–child relationship; “some translations are overly attached to their originals, and others are constantly rebelling.” The point, I suppose, is never a clone.
Lastly, I want to touch on the consensus both Weinberger and Davis seem to arrive at with respect to additions and modifications: that they are almost always gratuitous, and disfigure rather than give renewed shape to the source text. “A bad translation,” Weinberger writes, “is the insistent voice of the translator—that is, when one sees no poet and hears only the translator speaking.” I have certainly been taking the liberty of adding things for what I've thought might make my translation more interesting, but I think Weinberger and Davis make a compelling case here. And to go even further, it's probably important to think about, not just with respect to individual egos, but also within a larger (political, historical) context. I’m thinking about our conversation last week about cultural palatability, and the larger politics of significantly adding or omitting things from a translation. How do we stay cognisant not just of over-inserting ourselves (as individuals, our own styles and egos and biases) into translations, but also of not egregiously filtering work through larger cultural lenses and reinforcing existing hegemonic ideologies and structures, especially when translating into English?
- Abbey Perreault
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