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Refiguring self and other

Current Issues and New Approaches in

Translation StudiesAn Introduction

mberto Eco requires translation specialists to not only have the experience
of translating but also the experience of being translated, obviously into
a language they know, so they can work in close cooperation with their
translator. (Eco 2001, 6) This, of course, is an extremely fortunate position: not
all theorists are translators and very few translators are writers in their own right
with the degree of success that would call for translations of their works into
other languages. His statement imagines an ideal relationship between an original
author and her/his translator, which may be realized, with luck, only in the case
of a contemporary translation of a creative work. Eco categorizes as translation
any interpretive endeavor that follows an original text, be it an allusion, a pastiche, a parody, or even an adaptation in quite another mediumonly excluding
rewriting (106). His analyses of works of translation in a wider sense (a film
adaptation of a piece of piano music, for example) leads to his theory of translation proper, or adaptation of a written work into another language in a written
form (Eco 2001, 11920, 1258). Judging from his critiques of various types of
translation, the requirement he imposes on scholars or theorists of translation is
a proposal to examine and evaluate a work of translation proper simultaneously
from the perspectives of the original author and the translator, or from those of
the source language and the target language. It goes without saying that the act of
reading figures prominently in Ecos thinking: the translator here is very like his
Model Reader, one selected by the stylistic and other types of coding in the text
or, in the case of postmodern literature, one whose reading is already anticipated
by, or embedded in the text. The reader not only collaborates with the text but
also activates it or brings it into existence. (Eco 1979, 741) The model translator, like the Model Reader, is called to the task of translation by the texts codes
and activates the text in the context of the language into which the translation is

Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 54

made. As the Model Reader thinks and reads like the authoron the ideal level,
the reader is none other than the author herself/himselfthe model translator,
too, is expected to be as close to the original author as possible, presupposing a
contemporaneous and collaborative relationship between the two.
All of the contributors to Part I of this issue are academics, some of whom teach
courses on the theory and practice of translation. Some are also literary translators
and/or theorists, including those whose works have been translated into foreign
languages. As a group, if not individually, we are commendable in Ecos terms.
Our papers jointly reevaluate and rethink current issues of translation and propose
possibilities for new approaches and theories. We might begin with the traditional
assumption that the source text is an artifact that has been stabilized through age
and canonicity while the translation is a variable construct that depends on the
inclination and skill of the translator as well as the demand of her/his readership
or the target culture. A translation is ideally a transparent, or at least translucent,
film laid over the original artifact to make it accessible in a second language.
This film resembles the original but lacks its genuineness or authority. The target
language is a tool while the source text is the content to be conveyed. Fidelity to
the source is the primary duty of the translator in this formulation, but as long
as the work is being put into another language, the translator is obligated to be
considerate of the target language reader. Because the translator is also a writer,
she/he possesses as strong a desire as the original author to create a work of art.
In this traditional relationship, the translator, distanced from the original,
faces the eternal dilemma of translation, which Charles Inouye calls a lose-lose
proposition. His tragicomical essay borders on autobiography as it details his
experience with an elusive text of early 20th-century Japanese fiction. Drafting
a translation is already a battle between ethical duty (fidelity) and artistic desire
(readability) but the pressure of being sandwiched between the two becomes
intense when a colleague gives his manuscript a thorough reading. Being a
learned scholar and native-speaker of Japanese, she stands firmly on the side of
the source text and demands that the source language be represented in the closest
possible form in the borrowed clothing of English. Inouye, prisoner and victim
of compression between the weight of duty and the force of desire, still strains
his voice to sing a praise of the virtues of translationand this is comforting
to his reader as his song is set against the backdrop of a pastoral landscape of
farming in the memory of his childhood. The complex and conflicting relationship
between source and target has been studied in all sorts of ways but it is not easy
to theorize the translators split self or her/his actual toil. And, yet, these are
central concerns for translators and scholars of translation. This seems to be the
reason why translation constitutes such a self-conscious discipline of study and
why so many papers and essays in this issue refer to the translators own personal
experiences. Inouyes paper, foregrounding autobiography, suggests creative
writing as a possible way to represent the actuality of translation.
In Eugene Eoyangs paper, the end result of the translators suffering is seen
from the other side, namely, the perspective of a critic and instructor of Chinese
poetry in English (although Eoyang himself is a translator of poetry). Like Inouye,
he assumes a vertical relationship between source and translation but foregrounds

Literary Translation: Current Issues

and

New Approaches

the variability of translation. While a translation tends to be deemed good or bad

depending on the perspective of the judge, i.e., the reader, whose orientation can
be placed anywhere in the spectrum between source and target, Eoyang proposes
a criterion for evaluating poetic translations based on the degree of success in
combining the qualities of fidelity (the literal) and readability (the literary). His
is an attempt at an objective protocol for judgment for critical and pedagogical
purposes. According to permutations of four categories beginning with the least
commendable false to the letter; false to the spirit and ending with the ideal
true to the letter; true to the spirit, Eoyang examines the failures and successes
of English translations, including his own, of a wide range of Chinese poems,
classical and modern. These categories provide within his paper a framework
that allows his readers to encounter those characteristics of Chinese poeticity
that challenge translators. Under this same rubric the reader of the paper is led on
a guided tour of translations from the bottom level of the ridiculous to the final
level of the sublime.
The ethics of translation involves the translators responsibility not only
toward the source text, but also toward a potential readership, and by extension, to
society at large. Legal or economic pressure may censor the translators freedom of
expression. Social pressure may come from a particular cultures sexual prudence
or political correctness, to which the publisher and the translator may respond by
self-censorship, the topic of Yoshihiro Ohsawas paper. By examining the case of
a Japanese translation, by a prominent novelist, of an American childrens book,
he illustrates cultural differences in attitudes toward the question of political
incorrectness between the U.S. and Japanese publishing markets. The comparisons
he draws among German, French, and English versions of a contemporary Japanese
novel reveal different attitudes toward self-censorship, ranging from a belief in
fidelity to a taste for readability. One of his findings is that American translators,
inclined toward artistry, take greater liberties with the source text than their
European counterparts.
Perceiving the distance between source text and translator as the difficulty
of the source in the eye of the translator, Uchang Kim sheds a phenomenological
light on the relationship between poetry, translation, and society. Assuming that
translation is an impossibly difficult undertaking, he locates the chief difficulty
in the cultural differences between the source and the target of translation.
Drawing examples from sijo and other forms of Korean poetry and Japanese
haiku, Kim illustrates the elements of culturerhythm, music, caesurathat
declare themselves in non-verbal spaces within the source text. His pursuit of
causes of difficulty aids potential translators and cultural critics by clarifying the
characteristics that mark East Asian poetrysuch as exclamations, end words,
pauses, and the elimination of certain words, and conventional themes. These
elements, as they bracket a poetic world away from the real one, simultaneously
refer the poem to emotion and other elements of actual life and society, assigning
a cyclical function to poetry and its translation vis vis the real world.
The need and zeal for translation intensify at a juncture in history when a
culture is pressed to refigure its identity in the face of an overwhelmingly wide
and fast-moving encounter with other cultures. Katsuya Sugawara examines

Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 54

Japanese translations of Western poetry at just such a juncture in Japans history,

when the need to study and catch up with Western civilization was intense. His
analyses of the poet-translators endeavors in representative anthologies of Western
poetry in translation, spanning from the late 19th to early 20th century, illustrate
the ways in which the Japanese used Western prosody for inventing their own
and for re-engaging familiarly Japanese conventions in new forms. Translations,
according to him, moved from source-oriented to target-oriented, from ornate to
colloquial, and from faithful to boldly inventive renditions. The source text was
no longer the content for which translation served as a tool; translation, in fact,
was now an artifact for which the original text was either raw material or a source
of inspiration. Since the translators in question were poets in their own right, the
shadows of fidelity and invisibility did not darken their pursuits for long and their
translations readily laid claim on authorship. Here is a case of translation taking
the lead as literature and powerfully enriching the target language.
The history of concepts of translation is seen by Michael Henry Heim
as being parallel to the evolution of general literary trends or isms. Thus
postmodernity characterizes translation in our age, when it signifies chiefly
an act of involvement in the alterity of the source text. The content of cultural
difference is what Uchang Kim calls difficulty, but Heims emphasis is on the
translators self-consciousness in calling the readers attention to the otherness of
the source thereby declaring her/his translation, and the translator herself/himself,
as a separate entity. While rejecting both the exoticization of a foreign text by the
use of an archaic diction and, at the same time, its familiarization by the use of a
current colloquial style in the specific target language, Heim proposes methods
for representing the unfamiliarity of the source culture to the postmodern target
audience. Since it is not often possible to enact complex foreign elements in
the writing style of a translation nor is it easy to weave an explanation into the
text of translation, prefaces and notes are recommended as one of the functional
solutions. These constitute a text in which the translator and the reader can engage
in communication outside the translated text. The independence of prefaces and
notes makes the translation and its source text incomplete artifacts, inspiring further
responses in the forms of new translations and new notes while drawing attention
to the translator, a phenomenon in keeping with the aesthetics of postmodernity.
Yingjin Zhang, also situating himself within the current translation theory,
notes that the same shift of attention from source to target, or text to culture,
applies to the latest theory of adaptation as well. Within the context of the history
of Chinese adaptations of Shakespeare in various forms and media, Zhang focuses
on a 1931 Chinese silent film demonstrating the workings of the Chinese sense of
subjectivity that deconstructs the fictions of authorship, fidelity, and transparency.
A response to the Japanese invasion, the film expresses a surging nationalism
through the masculinization of women and the creation of the image of strong
national heroes, both of which distort and expand the source text. Even the image of
plum blossoms, a symbol of erotic love in traditional Chinese literature and art, is
assigned a new political signification. A film adaptation belongs to the category of
translation in a wider sense. The only parts of the film that can be called translation
proper are the bilingual intertitles projected on the screen, Chinese over English.

Literary Translation: Current Issues

and

New Approaches

Those intertitles consist of approximations of Shakespeares lines with their

Chinese equivalents above them, as well as additional invented lines of Chinese
text, reflecting changes in character relationships and the story line, accompanied,
below them, by their rough translations into English. This mutually reflective
scheme of the intertitles, most likely anonymously composed by multiple hands,
adds a complex intertextuality to the film and engages, presumably, a culturally
hybrid audience in the films simultaneous domestication and foreignization,
erasing borders between the source and the target.
John Milton evaluates modern theoretical approaches to translation while
analyzing a variety of works in translation that aim at decolonizing India,
Brazil, and Ireland. Warning against a reliance on modern European theory in
translating and evaluating translations of works from a culture quite outside the
European circle, he calls for ways of judgment on the source cultures terms.
Here, transparent/literal rendering of the text from or into a European language
is not possible. Thus the translator and the critic face a dilemma. An excessive
familiarization, i.e., Westernization, will result in a loss of alterity in the target
reader and of her/his chance to participate in reading the texts layers. On the other
hand, obsessive foreignization will cause stylistic awkwardness, alienating the
target readership. Either way, translation is prevented from serving the cause of
decolonization. Milton recommends that the translator occupy the hybrid ground
between source and target, mixing indigenous materials from the postcolonial
culture with those imported from the colonizers. At the same time, he celebrates
cases of aggressively political translation in which words are coined from foreign
roots and source texts are manipulated to the point of creative invention, recalling
the cases of established Japanese poets translation of Western poetry to create
their own poetics and genres (Sugawara) and the boldly political use of adaptation
in Chinese filmmaking (Zhang).
David Bellos problematizes foreignization theory by focusing on the issue of a
language that is neither the source nor the target. The foreign language (L3) placed
in the source text (T1) written in its indigenous language (L1) must be conveyed
in the translation (T2) in the target language (L2). Left in L3, the passages in T2
cannot be called a translation, while put into L2, the meaning of the use of L3 in
T1 is completely lost. The first choice foreignizes T1 while the other domesticates
it, each failing both the source culture and the target reader. The choice of leaving
the word in L3 or putting it in L2 depends on the cultural status of L3 in L2.
National ideology operates in the way L3 is handled, constructing what Bellos
calls Language Fictions, the typical case being the French insistence on their
language being the global standard. Occasionally, L3 used in the text written in
L1 is L2, in which case, the same word in L2 may not carry the same connotation
as in the text in L1 as it loses its contextual value in that language. The questions
the issue of L3 poses complicate the understanding of any language so that Bellos
suggests a history of L2, say, English, could be written through the decisions made
by translators when confronted with L3. In fact, Bellos reminds us, language has
a translingual capacity, so that no language constitutes an autonomous universe.
This notion points to the diversity of perspectives and the value of differences
warranted by the theory and phenomenon of multiculturalism. Indeed, the issue

Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 54

of L3, a dark hole left by existing theories of translation, deconstructs traditional

dichotomies. It deserves a reconfiguration of translation studies as called for by
Bellos.
My own modest contribution attempts at locating the role of the translator
in relation to the source text/language and to the target audience in this bordercrossing and border-erasing age of ours. Tracing the origin of the ideally
democratic relationship between source and target, such as that suggested by Eco,
to an early modern Japanese Confucian hermeneutist, I propose that hierarchical
distance is created by temporal and geographical, as well as linguistic differences,
which are highlighted by writtenness. For equality between author and translator,
the necessary conditions are contemporaneity, spokenness, and the authority of
the readers market. The history of translation traces a movement away from
originality, canonicity, and fidelity toward fluidity and equality. The first step was
a translation into Japanese of an American novel written in English in which Asian
languages and their cultural contexts are densely woven, the case, in Bellos terms,
of translating back into L2 a T1 which, not only contains L2, but the inclusion of
which constitutes much of the meaning of T1. The rise of bilingualism after the war
inspired the rise of a new type of reader, whose appreciation of the translation is
flexible and variable far beyond the prescribed boundaries of source and target or
author, translator, and reader. In the postmodern market, Ecos recommendations
have the opportunity to take shape as the author of the source text and the translator
may work dialogically and on equal terms. Indeed, it is quite possible that the
translation is far more valuable than the source text in their respective markets,
a case Bellos presents, shifting authorship between the two.
Within the limited space of a single journal issue it is not possible to survey
and evaluate all schools of thought on the subject of translation. The papers
included, however, respond to the latest shifts in focus from source to target,
from invisibility to authorship, from writing to production, and from universality
to specific differences. On issues of translation, related to the need to convey
differences, some innovative solutions are offered and new theoretical paths are
opened. Translation is broadly conceived to include adaptation and other forms
of production and media outside the written work. Discussions of translation in
performance (the singability of songs and the enactability on stage and screen)
receive new treatments in some of the papers. Finally, the studies of poetic
translations included herein render obsolete the notion that poetry is what is lost
in translation.

Sumie Jones

Literary Translation: Current Issues

and

New Approaches

Works Cited
Umberto Eco. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1979.
. Experiences in Translation. Alastair McEwen, trans. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001.