The Vegetarian: Nabokov's Nightmare

    I can’t help but feel discouraged by Tim Parks’ approach. I understand that his goal is not to assess the quality of the translation, but rather to treat The Vegetarian in English as a literary work and critique it as such. His remarks on style and tone, particularly as regards the cohesion of the narrator’s voice, were convincing; I think his argument was well built and supported. Yet, as an aspiring literary translator, his dissection of sentence and phrase-level choices did make me more hopeless than ever about the future of my work. While Charse Yun’s piece generally concurs with Parks, I thought it raised important questions such as the burden on translators and how expectations of translation shift over time. I enjoyed the metaphor of translation being “akin to having double vision,” and having to “block off one eye” in order to read it, though I’m not sure I completely agree. 

I knew little about The Vegetarian translation controversy, and the collection of articles here felt like listening to a roundtable discussion on the topic. In her own essay, Deborah Smith makes a convincing argument in favor of abandoning the framework of ‘faithfulness’ and ‘fidelity’ as it relates to literal translation. I strongly agree with her statement that “Literary translation can both resist and perpetuate cultural imperialism; as translators, we need to stay aware of our own biases,” I try to keep this at the forefront of all my translation work. Another point I enjoyed – and hadn’t been able to fully articulate before – was her claim that translation is the only art that can be “not just bad, but also wrong, and will never not be flawed.” 

Sun Kyoung Yoon’s social science/gender studies approach to the translation dilemma was fascinating. I was interested in the discussion of traditional translation-related language (terms like ‘faithful’ etc) and their relationship to ideals of patriarchal control. I feel a bit overwhelmed after reading all of these pieces, but on a positive note, it does generally make me feel better about the state of literary translation. I don’t think an AI translation will ever be able to generate this much buzz and give rise to such important discussions about the politics and ethics of translation.

- Luisa Bocconcelli