Hijacking Translation

Uneven Developments

Academia is slow to change. The snag, as Pierre Bourdieu observed, is resistance to new ideas which favors those that currently enjoy authority in a particular field. Academics harbor an anti-intellectualism, ironically, bred by the splintering of intellectual labor into so many institutional compartments. To specialize, however productive the yield in quantity and depth of knowledge, is to clap on a set of blinders.

Take the field of comparative literature. It originated in late nineteenth-century Europe, and from the 1950s onward it was firmly established in the United States, invigorated by the contributions of European émigré scholars and housed in departments and programs at many academic institutions. By 1975 a total of 150 schools offered degrees or concentrations on both the undergraduate and graduate levels; currently that figure stands at 187. Despite this remarkable growth, comparatists took more than a century to recognize that the field was grounded on fundamentally Eurocentric and nationalist assumptions.

During this period, the notion of comparing literatures amounted in most cases to a methodology that contained three critical moves. Resemblances were located among forms and themes from a canon of European works read in their original languages; differences were made intelligible in terms of the national languages, traditions, and cultures in which those works were rooted; more sweeping generalizations, whether transnational or universal, might ultimately be ventured, depending on the comparatist's assumptions about literature, society, or humanity. Erich Auerbach's magisterial Mimesis (1946), a locus classicus for this methodology, surveys "the literary representation of reality in European culture" from antiquity to the twentieth century, explicitly excluding the "consideration" of "foreign influences" ("fremde Einwirkungen") as "not necessary" (where "foreign" means transnational as well as non-European). Comparatists were expected to master a minimum of four European languages, including English, regardless of the fact that they increasingly came to rely on translations in their research and teaching. Not until the early 1990s, when the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) commissioned Charles Bernheimer to submit a committee-drafted "Report on Standards," did the field publicly confront its long exclusion of non-European cultures as well as the stigma it had attached to translation. The 1993 Bernheimer report, which was published with sixteen "responses" and "position papers," aimed to bring comparative literature in line with what were then perceived as "progressive tendencies in literary studies, toward a multicultural, global, and interdisciplinary curriculum," encompassing developments in literary and cultural theory, cultural studies, and film studies and treating elite literature as one among an array of cultural forms and practices.

Yet, despite the controversy provoked by the Bernheimer report, not much changed. Postcolonial theory emerged, decades after the militant anticolonial movements, amid an already expanded canon that included African, Asian, and Latin American literatures. By the 1990s this expansion had been institutionalized in myriad courses, publications, conferences, and professorships. Nonetheless, canons are by definition exclusionary because they necessarily create margins where literatures, authors, and works lie in the shadows of neglect. Even European literatures can be overlooked by all but the most narrowly focused specialists (consider Catalan, Hungarian, or modern Greek). And although the Bernheimer report recommends that "the old hostilities toward translation should be mitigated," the responses and position papers that accompanied it were divided on the issue, and translation studies continued to be peripheral in the United States. Translation gained legitimacy in the British Comparative Literature Association during the 1980s, and in the following decade British universities witnessed a mushrooming of degree programs that trained translators and specialized in translation research. U.S. comparatists, in contrast, concentrated unwaveringly on original compositions by canonical writers. With rare exceptions, a scholar's decision to translate or to study translations was likely to jeopardize an academic career.

As the Bernheimer report made clear, comparatists still looked askance at translation because of their investment in "the necessity and unique benefits of a deep knowledge of foreign languages" — even though translation can't be expertly studied or practiced without such an investment. At the start of the new millennium, however, the continuing marginality of translation also seemed to result from an uncertainty as to what it is and does. Haun Saussy's subsequent report for the ACLA, a collection of nineteen essays that assess "The State of the Discipline, 2004," includes an unprecedented essay on the valuable contribution that translation might make to the study of comparative literature. But Saussy's own essay expresses a certain disdain for translation by implicating it in "thematic reading": "What comes across in thematic reading (a tactic devised in response to conditions of our encounter with translated literature) is not necessarily what is most worth knowing about a work." The misguided reader is able to concentrate on theme, Saussy believes, because in translation "nothing of the work may survive the process but the subject matter."

On this point Saussy agrees with Auerbach. Although Auerbach's ideal audience would seem to command eight languages at various stages of historical development (namely, Hebrew, ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, German, and English), for his less knowledgeable readers he provides German translations of the passages he discusses. He assumes that the translations transmit the content necessary to make his readings intelligible. In effect, he treats that content as a semantic invariant on the basis of an instrumental model of translation.

Yet this assumption seems oddly credulous for comparatists with the range of languages known by Auerbach and Saussy (who was trained as both a classicist and a Sinologist). Translation can maintain a semantic correspondence, but surely this relation to the source text shouldn't be confused with giving back its theme unaltered. Translation detaches the source text from the diverse contexts that make it uniquely meaningful, valuable, and functional in the language and culture where it originated. Simultaneously, even while maintaining a semantic correspondence, translation builds a different set of contexts in the translating language, supportive of meanings, values, and functions that are new to both the source text and the receiving culture. Hence Saussy can assert that "a translator always perturbs the settled economy of two linguistic systems." But then why does he also think that "a translation always brings across most successfully aspects of a work for which its audience is already prepared"? Can an audience thus prepared also tolerate a translation that perturbs its language?...