Authority and the Text

 

The presuppositions inherent in any framework for translation demand a certain skepticism and interrogation. The situation that Isabelle Vanderschelden describes in her 2012 essay, “Authority in Literary Translation: Collaborating with the Author,” brings some of these elements into sharp relief by narrowing the consideration to those translations in which the original author has had some complicit role, as advisor, co-translator, or, to borrow an image from the introduction to the Nabakov letters, as dragon. Any literary work has, at minimum, as many loci as it has readers and writers; each participant in the text, whatever their authorial authority, creates the text in their own minds. Then the text itself, if it has been put down on paper, is an additional pseudo-locus, which has no creative power to imagine its own contents, but is the shared kernel of all other imaginations. In this way, the original writer of the text is no more than another reader, except that they possess an unnatural x-ray vision. It’s the kind of thing, however, that they cannot turn off, always also seeing across this additional spectrum of transmission, with their unique and personal knowledge of the creation of the work. As a writer, I am not my own best reader—I care too much about my intentions, not enough about my other readers, and worst of all, I know exactly all the things I know. I think that there is an appeal to treating literary documents as super-worldly, with a sensibility, not unlike the American transcendentalist perspective on the "natural world", that they must be revered as authoritative and thus protected. In fact, I think its just the opposite, they are sub-worldly, and for that reason they need to be protected, not to preserve a false sense of their purity, but to protect the distinctive human-ness of their creation event, which is the true authority that they take for their ground—their fallibility. I question my own ability to get this kind of distance and perspective on my own work, and it is clear from some, but not all, of the examples listed by Vanderschelden, that many of the authors who involve themselves in the translation of their own texts are coming from the former, defensive position, which posits an entirely posthumous world for the translation.  

Elijah