Because I’ve most often been thinking about translating work from other languages into English, I’ve most often thought about all of the cases where the translator holds a disproportionate amount of power. Isabelle Vanderschelden’s essay, considering how power can be wielded by the author, was helpful in thinking about what kind of role I’d want to have as a writer should my work in English ever be translated into other languages.
I found myself agreeing with André Brink and Marguerite Duras in a number of ways; a translation is borne from both the author’s brain and the translator’s brain, a kind of co-authorship of a text that is parallel to but different from the source. For a number of reasons—internal and external to the translator-author relationship—this co-authorship can be unequal. I’m thinking of the way Deborah Smith was asked if she thought The Vegetarian would have won the Booker without her translation. I’m thinking, in the reverse direction, of Jeremy Tiang’s look at the “celebrity playwright.” As Tiang said, translation can reinscribe old hierarchies of power—and this essay made me realize it can happen in both directions.
(An aside: I’m curious how this manifests in profit shares for authors and translators. What is the typical breakdown of profit share from book sales between author and translator? Or do translators often get paid stipends rather than share in the profit from sales?)
It was also fascinating to read Nabokov’s letters with Pertzoff; their collaboration seems in some ways collaborative, and in others, a near self-translation by Nabokov. I found it fascinating that he instructs Pertzoff to turn long phrases into smaller ones in English; this seems totally contradictory to his theory of translation we read last week. Is “dragonizing” something Nabokov believed he was entitled to as sort-of-self-translator, but an act of betrayal or incompetence when translating anyone else’s work?
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