Often, discussions about the role of translators and the space for creativity in literary translation focus on the oppositional couple visibility/invisibility suggested by Venuti. The dichotomy that he proposes conceives ‘foreignisation’ as the most source-oriented approach, the one in which the translator’s intervention is most visible; ‘domestication’, instead, implies silencing, flattening, or standardising all foreign elements in favour of a more target-oriented version of the text. Despite having some important merits, this approach, as any binary perspective, risks becoming an oversimplification of the complexities involved in the translation process.
This section aims to unveil some of the issues behind Venuti’s positions, in order to clarify that what tends to be considered one of the main theoretical and practical references for translators is actually a highly contradictory and limiting view of the translator’s task. It will be argued that even the most domesticating path can be an appropriate choice. This will highlight the importance of awareness of the possibilities translators have in between polarity. This section thus represents an important frame for the practical study of Frame’s verse in Chapter 6. Indeed, when translation theory meets praxis there is an easy risk of falling into binary thinking: wrong/right, appropriate/inappropriate, foreignising/domesticating. I contend that a critical, open look at the practical challenges of translation, informed by a more realistic approach than Venuti’s position, favours subjectivity and creativity in translation. Furthermore, it can help translators define their procedures more clearly and critically, relieving them of the burden to pursue an impossible fidelity to a single strategy.
Translation is a process of constant negotiation and re-negotiation.120 Caught in an endless process of choice making, the translator is constantly choosing among infinite options. The high number of variables at stake and the inextricable links with cultural elements make the acceptance of loss necessary. It is the way one understands this loss that changes one’s approach to the translation task. Poet and translator Norman Shapiro stated that he saw translation as
an attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections, scratches,
120
bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.121
Shapiro believes that translators have to mask their subjectivity and submit it to the source. Translations thus have to be thickly veiled texts: one should not discern anything in it that makes one wonder what is behind that veil; on the contrary, one should forget that what is before one’s eyes is a translation at all. Essentially, both authors and translators have frequently emphasised the subordinate nature of translation. Willard Trask, for example, drew a clear distinction between authoring and translating. In a late interview, he was asked whether the impulse to translate could be compared to the impulse to write a novel; he replied:
No, I wouldn’t say so, because I once tried to write a novel. When you’re writing a novel [...] you’re obviously writing about people or places, something or other, but what you are essentially doing is expressing yourself. Whereas when you translate you’re not expressing yourself. You’re performing a technical stunt. [...] I realized that the translator and the actor had to have the same kind of talent. What they both do is to take something of somebody else’s and put it over as if it were their own. I think you have to have that capacity. So in addition to the technical stunt, there is a psychological workout, which translation involves: something like being on stage. It does something entirely different from what I think of as creative poetry writing.122
Following one of the most recurrent metaphors for translators, Trask states that translating is like acting: one is not spelling out one’s own words, but those of others. Creativity seems to be totally excluded from the translation process. Shapiro claimed that he was a sort of collaborator of the writer: ‘Certainly my ego and personality are involved in translation, and yet I have to try to stay faithful to the basic text in such a way that my own personality doesn’t show’.123
These theories have undoubtedly contributed to increase the marginal position of translators.
The consequences of the inaccuracies regarding the translator’s role and, above all, the nature of the translation act have produced, according to Venuti, cultures that are
121
Norman Shapiro, quoted in Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 1.
122
Willard Trask, quoted in Venuti, The Translator’s invisibility, p. 7.
123 Norman Shapiro, quoted in Dennis Kratz, ‘An Interview with Norman Shapiro’, Translation Review, 19
‘aggressively monolingual, unreceptive to the foreign, accustomed to fluent translations’.124
These transport the foreign text within a domestic reality and thus ‘provide readers with the narcissistic experience of recognizing their own culture in a cultural other’.125
This act of cultural – and literary – violence has grown to huge proportions and Venuti’s position, even if some points are unclear, is explicit in its intentions to change the current state of affairs and initiate a new policy to promote the translator’s visibility, both in theory and in practice. His point is that, if fluency starts to be seen as only one discursive effect among others, translations could and should be read as translations, that is to say texts in their own right.126
When Venuti says that domesticating translation is an act of violence, he is referring to those TTs (and the beliefs behind them) that try to reconstruct the foreign on the basis of values that are not their own. It seems that an impossible reconciliation is at stake here: any source text will always have to come into contact with cultural and intertextual references that are not its own; this is the premise of translation. This clash can never be removed, but what can change is how one looks at it and the way translators handle its inevitable consequences. In Venuti’s words, a target text ‘necessarily suffers a reduction and exclusion of possibilities – and an exorbitant gain of other possibilities’, which is where the creative turn and Venuti’s project coincide.127
The intention of critics and editors has always been to deny these possibilities and propose fluency as the only acceptable option. Fluency has its advantages, of course, but at what risk? In Venuti’s opinion:
The aim of translation is to bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self- conscious projects, where translation serves an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political. Translation can be considered the communication of a foreign text, but it is always a communication limited by its address to a specific reading audience. [...] translation wields enormous power in the construction of national identities for foreign cultures, and hence it
124
Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 15.
125
Ibid.
126 ‘The ultimate aim of the book is to force translators and their readers to reflect on the ethnocentric
violence of translation and hence to write and read translated texts in ways that seek to recognise the linguistic and cultural difference of foreign texts’. Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 41.
127
potentially figures in ethnic discrimination, geopolitical confrontations, colonialism, terrorism, war.128
Building on polysystem theory, this quote clarifies that any translation, even one that moves towards the foreign, can signify difference only by disrupting the target system; it has to deviate from the norm and ‘stage an alien reading experience’.129
This experience of alienation departs from the choice of a text excluded by the target canon, to get to the use of marginal discourses to translate it.
Although culture-bound elements will inevitably remain ‘foreign’ in comparison with target values (they will always be submitted to the domestic system of values), foreignising-resistant strategies are presented by Venuti as desirable. He claims that foreignisation shows an awareness of the other, does not mask TTs under illusionary conceptions, does not enact further wrong ideas about translation, promotes a more active role for translators, responds to and modernises national canons, and engages in processes of signifying the foreign rather than obscuring it. In the current state of affairs on a world-scale, including globalisation, ‘[f]oreignising translation [...] can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism’.130
So, what is really innovative in Venuti’s argument is the way resistancy can turn the cultural clash between ST and TT into the definition of more democratic approaches to foreignness. The awareness that foreignising strategies are not transparent precludes the conception of this notion as an ethics of translation (as Schleiermacher’s theories were defined by Berman).131 Nevertheless, even if they appear no less partial than domesticating strategies in their interpretation of the source, they show an understanding of the limits and possibilities of their partiality, rather than focussing solely on their inevitable incompleteness.
Schleiermacher preceded Venuti in the elaboration of a target-oriented approach to translation. For him, the first opportunity to foreignise lies in the choice of the text to translate. After this first step, foreignising strategies represent tools that can help create a democratic national culture;132 however, opening up translation practices to the other also
128 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 129 Ibid., p. 20. 130 Ibid. 131
Berman, quoted in Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 20.
132
As Venuti explains, foreignising translation strategies lacked cultural capital in nineteenth-century England, while they were perceived more positively in Germany.
entails mining one’s own values.133
Schleiermacher was aware that even foreignising strategies were partial and ethnocentric: every bend towards the foreign is always made within a domestic political agenda and inscribed in the target system. Hence, the belief, shared by Venuti, that ‘translation is always ethnocentric’.134
Schleiermacher’s lecture remained untranslated, so it was only available to a few English translators during the nineteenth century. Other theorists developed different foreign-oriented views, such as Newman. In line with his concept of liberal education and his preoccupation with the recognition of cultural differences, he stated:
The translator, it seems, must carefully obliterate all that is characteristic of the original, unless it happens to be identical in spirit to something already familiar in English. From such a notion I cannot too strongly express my intense dissent. I am at precisely the opposite; – to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as I am able [...] the English translator should desire the reader always to remember that his work is an imitation [...].135
For Newman, transparency is an illusion that risks confusing source and target texts. Therefore, translators should opt, instead, for strategies that signify the differences between the two texts, and signal the presence of a cultural encounter.
On the opposite bank is Lefevere, who bases his argument on Nida’s criticism of Schleiermacher: ‘we are faced here with a not-illogical and very spirited defence of what we know now as “translationese” or, with another phrase: “static equivalence”’.136
The term ‘translationese’ began to be used after the Second World War, and Lefevere approved of Nida’s concept of ‘dynamic equivalence’, which is now, according to Venuti, a synonym of domesticating strategies.137 Therefore, the idea that a translator can face a text with profoundly different approaches was not new.
133
Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 100.
134 Ibid., p. 101. Since Schleiermacher wanted to influence ‘the whole evolution of a culture’, his ideas on
foreignisation were specifically addressed to the German educated elite. Only the educated, upper-class members of society had the power to shape cultural evolution; therefore, the project of the German scholar was at the same time nationalist and elitist. So, although his ideas regarding translation and openness to the foreign mark a definite move towards a change in approach to textuality, the nationalist and elitist elements make Schleiermacher’s project radically different in principle to Venuti’s, even if they share the same intention of producing more source-inclined translations (Ibid. pp. 102, 109).
135
Francis W. Newman, quoted in Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 121.
136
Eugene Nida, quoted in Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, pp. 117–18. 137
Nonetheless, Venuti’s theory of visibility (foreignisation) and invisibility (domestication) has received various attacks from translation scholars. Maria Tymoczko points out that Venuti does not define the terms foreignisation and domestication. He argues the importance of foreignising translations, but he never specifies what it is precisely that makes a TT foreign-oriented.138 If the terms are not well defined, or quantified, how can a translator know if s/he is producing a foreignised text? If one cannot measure foreignisation, how can one know when one has reached resistancy? Venuti makes clear that foreignisation and domestication do not constitute a binary opposition, but rather two poles containing a range of possibilities:
[T]he terms ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignisation’ do not establish a neat binary opposition that can simply be superimposed on ‘fluent’ and ‘resistant’ discursive strategies [...]. The terms ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignisation’ indicate fundamentally ethical attitudes towards foreign text and culture [...] whereas terms like ‘fluency’ and ‘resistancy’ indicate fundamentally discursive features of translation strategies in relation to the reader’s cognitive processing. Both sets of terms demarcate a spectrum on the relation between a translation project and the hierarchical arrangement of values in the receiving situation at a particular historical moment.139
Venuti unequivocally denies that the two terms represent a dichotomy; on the contrary, he emphasises the spectrum of possibilities translators can choose from in order to engage in resistancy. Nevertheless, Tymoczko contends that no spectrum can be fully understood or realised if its two extremes are not clarified in their definition and specifications.140 Similarly, Mona Baker insists that what Venuti describes is essentially a dichotomous opposition, and asserts that any set of two main alternatives is too simple to describe the reality of what happens in translation practice. She seems to disregard Venuti’s words about the spectrum of effects and writes:
Lawrence Venuti’s sweeping dichotomies of foreignizing and domesticating strategies [...], recast elsewhere as minoritizing and majoritizing strategies [... a]part from reducing the rich variety of positions that translators adopt in relation to their texts, authors and
138 Maria Tymoczko, quoted in Kjetil Myskja, ‘Foreignisation and resistance: Lawrence Venuti and his
critics’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 12.2 (2013), 1–23 (p. 7).
139
Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, p. 19. 140
societies, [...] reduce the intricate means by which a translator negotiates his or her way around various aspects of a text into a more-or-less straightforward choice of foreignizing versus domesticating strategy.141
The focus is again on dichotomy and the way oppositional couples cannot be applied in the description of translation processes. However, Venuti was aware of the complexities of the task and did not aim to reduce it to the simplest of structures. When he engages with the limits of foreignisation, he implicitly demonstrates his awareness of the reductionist power of the dichotomy. Foreignisation and domestication should, therefore, be understood as labels indicating a certain attitude toward the text and the process of meaning transfer to the target system.
With regard to the role of the target culture, Kjetil Myskja writes:
In order to achieve a resistant effect within the target language discourse, the translator would be dependent on balancing elements of domestication and foreignisation in such a way that it is domesticated enough to be accepted into the discourse, and yet alien and foreignising enough to be resistant. Venuti clearly agrees that a balance of these elements would be required – a totally foreignising translation is, in a sense, no translation at all – but this still seems to make the assessment of the foreignising vs. domesticating effect into an assessment of the socio-political effect of the text in a certain society at a certain time.142
Though she proposes a more balanced approach to Venuti’s work, Myskja too focusses on the inconvenience of a dichotomy in the description of the translator’s task.
A further criticism comes from Tarek Shamma, who supports Tymoczko’s and Baker’s points, and adds that foreignising translation can easily lead to exoticising texts, that is to say forms of writing reinforcing English prejudices against the source culture. His case study is based on nineteenth-century translations from Arabic into English, and he notes that, despite showing foreignising intentions, some TTs only resulted in the imposition of English values and cultural references over Arabic ones. Such translations
141 Mona Baker, ‘Reframing Conflict in Translation’, Social Semiotics, 17.2 (2007) 151–69 (p. 152). 142 Kjetil Myskja, ‘Foreignisation and Resistance: Lawrence Venuti and his Critics’, Nordic Journal of English Studies, 12.2 (2013), 1–23 (p. 11).
work towards the reinforcement of biased views and prejudices about the foreign, rather than presenting it in its otherness.143
With regard to the negative consequences of foreignisation, Michal Cronin interestingly reverses Venuti’s point, claiming that a foreignising approach could have a detrimental effect on the target literary system if this latter is a minority-language culture. He sees a danger of lesser-known languages losing their identity, which is perhaps already threatened by the predominance of high-capital cultures. Foreignising strategies, in this case, could imbue their lexicon and syntax with well-known words or phrases to such a point that their very survival could be at stake. As Myskja states, ‘every margin has its own margin’ and if it is an interesting experiment to present foreign elements of marginalised cultures in a dominant cultural system, the introduction of dominant linguistic- cultural elements in a peripheral reality is likely not to have the ethical effect Venuti suggested. In fact, some of the elements of the dominant system might be so well known in the minority target culture that references to them will not be seen as foreignising strategies, let alone as resistant.144