The Vegetarian Translation Critiques

 I just realized I forgot to post! Sorry!

Tim Parks’s critique of Smith’s translation was enough to make me doubt the artistry of it. I agreed with his assessment of the excerpts as stilted and at times redundant. This strange voice was carried over in her essay, which oscillated from humble to defensive within paragraphs. Yoon’s paper attempts to defend the translation’s infidelity and apparent shortcomings as serving a feminist purpose. She points out that there is precedent for feminist translators to “‘intervene’ in the source texts and ‘correct’ texts” (940). Erasing misogyny in the process of translating without explanation is not obviously feminist to me. Yoon provides examples of additions and omissions in Smith’s translation she claims serves this feminist aim. Smith’s translation omits In-hye’s vacillations about her husband and her resentment of her sister, making In-hye a more feminist character. This sacrifices a complex rendering in service of the creation of another flawless female victim. Again, this seems less than feminist to me. If the original sought to portray In-hye’s self-recrimination about her ‘failure’ of her husband in a relentlessly patriarchal society, how could Smith justify simplifying the narrative while complicating the prose? Translation is of course a creative endeavor, but it is fundamentally recreation rather than creation. Yoon describes a view of feminist translation as a radical rejection of the role of the translator as taking the “inferior role of ‘reproduction’ … ‘understood to be a servant’” (940), but is it patriarchal to want a translation that serves the original rather than undermining it, especially with such a rich, already feminist source text, written by a woman? Even the subtler text-level differences that Yoon presents as aiding a feminist reading seem less than effective to me. For example, she purports that Smith’s addition of “And what’s more, she’s even imposed this ridiculous diet on me” serves a feminist purpose (943), but to me it seems to only add redundancy—the original communicates the same thing. At the same time, it’s hard to argue with the translation’s success. How can one quibble with the quality of the prose if it succeeded in what is any translation’s goal: bringing a text to new readers.

                                                                                                                                Emerson