Figurative Representations of Translation as Art Form and Craft (Tennant)

Brian Nelson describes literary translation as a "self-conscious practice," "an art of imitation," "a quest to find and reproduce a text's voice," and "a performance art, combining close reading and creative (re)writing." Anthea Bell compares it to "spinning an illusion" or "walking the tightrope of illusion." Eliot Weinberger chooses the metaphor of a "palimpsest," or text written on top of another text. Central to each of these characterizations is the idea of manipulating language, or, as Proust puts it, "phrase-making." It is this manipulation that then becomes the object of appreciation or criticism, which Weinberger demonstrates so consistently and persuasively in his expositions of the 29 translations of Wang Wei. 

Quick digression: I am currently enrolled in a literary criticism course and have been thinking a lot about translation as a semiotic process (à la Roland Barthes), as an act of transference of one system of signs (source language) to another (target language), with the ultimate goal of preserving the signification of the original. An English speaker should finish reading a translated edition of, say, Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and be left with the same impression (i.e., a similar affective, psychological, and intellectual state) as a Russian native reading the original. Both texts should elicit a similarly resonant effect, carry an equivalent force of artistry. Of course, personal taste and sensibility are relative when it comes to readership, but the form and content of a translated text should, in the very least, resemble the form and content of its predecessor. Ultimately, I think the different techniques that translators like Brian Nelson and Lydia Davis used to (re)create the "coiling elaboration" and "dynamic" framework of Proust's narrative share a guiding principle: the text has an "essence." Thus, I would describe literary translation as the act of making manifest the essence of a text, using its tangible parts (its mechanics) to reproduce the element of intangibility that makes a novel or poem an artifact. Does that make sense? I sure hope so...

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