Are translators supposed to be invisible?

I found Isabelle Vanderschelden’s piece particularly interesting because it addresses something that’s crossed my mind a few times this semester, that something being the relationship between author and translator when the author of the source text is available to collaborate. I remember this being on my mind during our readings about Deborah Smith’s translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. My mind did a record scratch every few minutes of reading: why did Smith not touch base with Kang? Smith did address this in her essay, and I understand it’s not particularly easy to contact someone you don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like an impossible task to me. It seemed, and somewhat still does seem, strange to me that a translator would not want to have some form of dialogue with the author of the work they’re translating, but I understand the point that Vanderschelden is making in her piece about the dangers of that relationship placing the role of the translator in a subordinate position rather than a primary one (although this would be more of a problem in the case that the author has a strong footing in the language which the translator is translating their text into). Nabakov seems to want the role of the translator to be a subordinate one, at least in the case of his own translating based on the reading from last week, and he does maintain an emphasis on precision in his letters we read for this week, but he also admits to “dragonizing” (which I found funny), something that theoretically makes the translation more of its own entity than a painfully exact conversion from one language to another. Painful precision seems to be what Borges is satirizing in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote— how far is one willing to go to recreate a source text as exactly as possible across languages, and at what point does that effort become futile and turn into an entirely separate endeavor? This reminds me of Damion Searle’s claim (which most of us seemed to disagree with) that if “you’ve read a successful English translation of War and Peace, then you’ve read Tolstoy.” I don’t think this is wrong, per say, but I don’t think it’s a hard and fast truth. That mindset fully erases the work of the translator; in some cases that might be the goal, but it’s not particularly productive goal in any area except marketability. People want to say they've read Tolstoy, which I understand. The translator's facilitation of that act is not a detraction from it, though, at least not to me.

Samantha Long