In Metamorphoses, Ovid writes of Thetis, another shapeshifting goddess. One day Peleus, who has been told to impregnate Thetis, visits the cave where she lives. The sea goddess takes the shape of a bird, a tree, and finally a tiger, scaring off her assailant. After this, Proteus tells Peleus to tie Thetis down and wait for her to exhaust herself: “Though she deceives you with a hundred counterfeit shapes, hold her to you, whatever she becomes, until she is again what she was before.” The plan works—Thetis finds it exhausting to hide her true form. Having returned to herself, she concedes that Peleus must have the gods on his side. They conceive Achilles.
By shapeshifting, Thetis delays the gendered fate assigned to her: motherhood. Throughout history, the opera diva has achieved something similar. Her voice, “the instrument by which [her] identities can expand and change,” offered the diva a career, allowing her to evade the expectations of conventional womanhood without threatening the patriarchal order. And not only was the diva tolerated, she was indispensable to opera. Only women could perform the high-range vocal repertoire, especially after the disappearance of castrati in the mid-nineteenth century. By making a career out of shapeshifting, the diva became more powerful than even Thetis: she didn’t just delay her gendered fate, she bypassed it.
The diva is so central to opera that it’s easy to forget that she is, by definition, an interpreter. She shapeshifts in order to present the works of different composers. Her artistic offering is not solely her own.
An artistic interpreter (a musician, actor, or translator) renders source texts (by a composer, playwright, or author) into new forms. An interpreter—from the late Latin interpretator, or “explainer”—explains an artwork to those who can’t appreciate its original form (the musical score, the theatrical script, or the foreign-language text). Interpreters shapeshift between different source authors, but they also shapeshift between functions, starting as readers and ultimately becoming musicians, performers, or writers. These transformations are no less thrilling than those in Metamorphoses.
But even the most virtuosic shapeshifter has a static identity, and this identity is received differently depending on the art form. In opera, we take pleasure in watching the diva mediate the tenuous line between herself and her role. That’s why it’s acceptable when she breaks character to acknowledge applause at the end of an aria. We also love imagining how her personal passions connect to the scene on stage. During Leontyne Price’s last performance in 1985, the “O patria mia” aria—Aida’s farewell to her country—is actually the diva’s valediction to opera. When Price begins crying at the end of the scene, it’s clear that the tears are her own. The audience applauds, exhilarated and empathetic. In 1958, when Maria Callas sang the title role in Cherubini’s Medea, critics imagined that her virulent performance was inspired by her recent ousting from the Metropolitan Opera. For any diva, the role of Tosca—especially the “Vissi d’arte” aria—is assumed to be her autobiographical meditation on what it is to be a singer. A true opera diva never disappears into a role completely. Even if she intends to, her audience will continue to speculate on her personal investment. For centuries, singers and viewers have performed this cultural script.
Though literary translators also have identities (as people and as creative writers), any glimmer of personality in their work is often met with discomfort. Especially following the Romantic period, the work of literary translators has been imagined as derivative, rote, and “feminine,” as opposed to the task of authorship, which is creative, inspired, and “masculine.” Gender is central to this paradigm, which, according to Lori Chamberlain, “depicts originality or creativity in terms of paternity and authority.” Translators have traditionally been expected to reproduce the source author’s intellectual progeny, much like wives were expected to reproduce their husbands’ biological progeny. By prioritizing loyalty to the source text above all, the literary translator leaves the author’s paternity unchallenged. This paradigm prizes the translator’s silence.
Just as the opera diva historically bypassed the predetermined roles of wife and mother, she transcends this gendered understanding of interpretation. Most live performers do, in fact. Audiences typically value the artistry of the performer in front of them more than the creative authority of the absent composer or playwright. This is especially true of the opera diva, a figure who, according to Matthew Epstein, “faces a whole house of people and by her bravura, her virtuosity, makes them submit to her.” In a reversal of the Thetis myth, the shapeshifter forces the audience into submission. We invite the diva to overpower us (and perhaps the composer, too) because we value her “voice”—literally, her singing voice, and metaphorically, her personal perspective.
Somehow, we’ve neglected our desire to surrender and be thrilled in our interactions with some of the most vital interpreters of our time: literary translators. Although we praise them for being seen and not heard, translators are more like opera divas than we assume. By denying them the right to thrill us, we also deny ourselves a more joyous and complete relationship with literature.
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Peleus doesn’t follow the typical Ovidian lover’s narrative: love at first sight, pursuit, and rape. In fact, Peleus is just following orders. Proteus foretells that Thetis will be the mother of a great son, one who will become more famous than his father. A threatened Jove immediately abandons his interest in Thetis and orders his grandson, Peleus, to impregnate her. Even before recounting her shapeshifting abilities, Ovid has revealed Thetis’s essential threat: she is capable of reproducing a better version of her male partner.
A similar anxiety has shaped our understanding of translation. The feminine-coded translator is expected to be loyally devoted to the masculine-coded author’s source text. Lori Chamberlain suggests that “the reason translation is so overcoded, so overregulated, is that it threatens to erase the difference between production and reproduction which is essential to the establishment of power.” When a translator takes creative license, introducing their own voice into the text, they challenge the paternity of the original text and thus the legitimacy of Western aesthetics. The translator may be considered transgressive or problematic for creating a better version of the original, just as Thetis is feared for her ability to create a better version of her child’s father.
This anxiety manifests when readers attribute any merit of a translation to the author’s genius and any defect to the translator’s ineptitude. The New York Times recently reported that Elsa Morante’s novel, “even in Goldstein’s adroit translation, is a sledgehammer performance.” The writer implies that all translations—even “adroit” ones—diminish the impact of a work. This is a misguided mode of engagement: as if the reader could push aside the translator and hear the source author, as if the translator hadn’t created the source author in the reader’s ear.
In the opera house, only critics are allowed such a pessimistic, fussy attitude. Most audience members enjoy the singer’s artistry instead of speculating on her loyalty to the absent (most commonly, male) composer. Trusting the diva is a historical habit: before recordings were widespread, audiences relied on her for access to opera. Today, with countless performances online, we can experience opera without relying solely on the physical appearance of performers. We can even evaluate singers’ performances by comparing different renditions. But our previous centuries-long dependence on singers has sealed our attitude of adoration.
In our time, one of the biggest limitations on our engagement with art is linguistic. Few of us have the language skills to appreciate works of literature written in different languages. We need to start viewing translators as indispensable mediums for non-Anglophone voices, just as nineteenth-century audiences relied on live singers to hear opera. This means cultivating the same impulse to adore, the same respect for interpreters’ artistic skill.
By considering the historical, patriarchal paradigm in which the role of the translator has been defined, we can overturn this gendered understanding of translation from its roots. Since the translator has traditionally been imagined as a silenced, domestic, and overlooked woman, her historical counterpart is a vocal, public, and celebrated woman: the opera diva. I draw this comparison in order to propose the concept of the “diva mode” of translation. Translators working in the diva mode draw attention to their own tastes, talents, and personalities. They exhibit such creative autonomy that audiences focus more on their artistry than on their interpretative role. Any interpreter—singer or translator—runs the risk of encroaching on the author’s vision. But instead of approaching this interpretive act conservatively, translators in the diva mode push the boundaries. On the strength of their voices, they are able to move the author’s work in new linguistic, cultural, and semantic directions.
I have figured the diva mode as a practice, not an identity (the “diva mode” rather than the “diva translator”) because very few translators work this way all the time. The diva mode isn’t ideal for every project. The first translation of a work into the target language usually calls for a translator’s evenhanded reservation. Equally, when translating an author with less privilege, the translator may choose to prioritize the author’s expression over their own. The diva mode has been abused in this way for centuries when writers such as Ezra Pound and Ted Hughes used foreign authors previously untranslated into English as muses for their own creativity.
The diva mode entails a high degree of personal intervention in the process of translation. Though no translator can totally silence their voice, those working in the diva mode seek to amplify it. Just as in opera, there are singers who satisfactorily perform the composer’s score, and then there are divas who—in addition to fulfilling this basic requirement—offer their passion and personality. The diva translation mode is ideal for translation projects with particular personal or political stakes. Just as the diva upsets the divide between stage and audience, the translator working in the diva mode might initiate discourse with readers of their translation beyond the page.
Admittedly, many have already compared translation to musical performance and most translators are tired of hearing new metaphors for translation. Why can’t translators just be what they are? The constant metaphorization seems to make them even more secondary. But instead of inviting translators to rethink their work, the concept of the diva translation mode encourages readers to rethink how we listen to translations, to reimagine ourselves as an adoring audience. Where there is a diva, after all, there ought to be worshippers.
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A translator must master the rules of two languages. They must also appreciate the many shades of the source text and its context in the author’s oeuvre. For these reasons–and rightly so–translation is considered a technical, rational, and scholarly task. The trouble with this view is that we feel especially empowered to criticize cultural products when we believe we understand how they are made. If translation is a logical process that anyone with expertise could complete, then it becomes easy to nitpick. Conversely, opera viewers are unlikely to criticize a diva’s choices because her work is regarded as supernatural.
But, just as for translators, technical competence is the foundation of a singer’s work. The most anticipated moment in opera is the “follie” scene, “an enactment of insanity in an opera for which immense vocal skills and the highest level of vocal virtuosity is required.” We perceive emotion and irrationality, but only the diva’s diligent practice prepares her for such challenging performances. Similarly, the most radical interpretive acts are made possible by the translator’s linguistic competence and thorough research. Both translators and opera divas combine technical skill with the supernatural. By ignoring the diva’s diligence and the translator’s magic we fail to understand either of them.
To create a radical interpretation, a translator must amplify their own perspective. In Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading, Clive Scott argues that this perspective is already inherent in any translation since a translation represents the translator’s personal experience of reading the original text. Scott believes that the translator’s “individual consciousness,” “individual voice,” and “individual performance” are the heart of their work. In his view, the translator’s artistic stature is equal to that of the source text’s author, similarly to how, according to Julie Buckler, “the opera prima donna vied with the opera composer or literary author in claiming the role of Romantic genius-creator.”
In the diva mode, as per Scott’s view, the translator acknowledges and consciously incorporates their own voice into their translation, perhaps even imagining it as a text co-written with the author. Vladimir Nabokov exemplifies this aspect of the diva mode, arguing that the translator must have “as much talent, or at least the same kind of talent as the author that he chooses.” Nabokov’s 1964 translation of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin’s masterful novel-in-verse, was the ultimate assertation of his talent. Though Nabokov claimed his highest priority was loyalty to the source text, the four-volume translation is, more than anything, his own personal and scholarly reading of this Russian classic. Pushkin’s novel only spans part of the first volume; the other three are Nabokov’s commentary. The translation itself smacks of Nabokov’s own style, including his “addiction to rare and unfamiliar words,” as Edmund Wilson put it. The reader of this translation likely learns more about Nabokov than about Eugene Onegin itself.
Anne Carson, the Canadian classicist and poet, does something similar in her hybrids of translation, poetry, and autobiography. Her example is more extreme than Nabokov’s; given the gendered history of translation, it is a radical reversal for a woman writer to use someone else’s work as a catalyst for her own. Moreover, while Nabokov legitimates his self-insertion by billing the project as scholarship, Carson’s work is quite openly artistic and personal. She translates Catullus not for his own sake, but for hers. In Nox, Carson uses his poem “101” as an intertext in her meditation on her brother’s death. This is the self-interested way we all interact with texts; we simply expect translators to pretend otherwise. Carson, a champion of the diva mode, refuses to pretend.
Though such approaches to translation are often criticized, this type of self-insertion is standard practice in opera. Singers had been performing cadenzas, solo passages placed at the end of a musical piece, for centuries. Nineteenth-century divas also performed aria insertion, “the practice that allowed singers to introduce arias of their own choice into opera productions.” Hilary Poriss emphasizes how divas used aria insertion in order to assert “their own authorial voices.” They could share their broader musical interests, showcase specific technical skills, or make deft political commentary.
Translators working in the diva mode practice this type of autobiographical insertion in many ways. They may construct a substantial paratext, intervening using footnotes or essays. They may introduce their own dialect, as Timothy Sergay did when translating the Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky. Sergay writes: “My basic lexical and stylistic orientation was toward informal, somewhat jockish U.S. youth English more or less of the 1960s, an idiom with which I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia.” The translator may also apply a critical lens to a project, challenging a privileged author or work, as Emily Wilson did in her 2018 translation of Homer’s Odyssey. These radical interpretations characterize the diva translation mode and constitute its interest to readers. A translator’s confidence in their own perspective, their “bravura,” their “virtuosity,” make us want to submit to them, just as with opera divas. We forget our need to evaluate a translation’s authenticity, accuracy, or loyalty and instead exult in the basic pleasure of reading.
Most recently, Wilson’s Odyssey translation has illustrated the power of the diva translation mode, both on the page and beyond. Wilson destabilizes the classical canon by emphasizing the reality of slavery in Homer’s world and by turning her attention to Homer’s female characters. Motivated, too, by a critical view of class, Wilson pushes the work off its elitist pedestal by using contemporary words and concepts such as “canapés” and “tote bags.” Many classicists have challenged Wilson’s approach, and especially her rendition of the epic’s first line: “Tell me about a complicated man.” Wilson insists, however, that connecting with readers is more important than accurately representing Homer’s every word. She also gives free rein to her artistic impulses, using repeated phrases in the original text (such as “rosy-fingered Dawn”) as opportunities to riff, much like an opera diva might add new ornamentation with each repetition of a musical phrase. Fittingly, one critic called Wilson’s translation “a performance well-deserving of applause.”
Wilson’s use of the diva mode is evident in her shrewd political perspective and thoughtful artistry. And she has received a great deal of figurative applause, partly because, after finishing her performance, she raised her eyes to her audience. Wilson has given many interviews about this project and continues to discuss it actively on Twitter. In this, she highlights another feature of the diva translation mode: the translator’s visibility beyond their written work.
For the most part, famous translators initially become famous thanks to the success of prior creative work; Vladimir Nabokov, Anne Carson, and Jhumpa Lahiri are examples. The problem with this fame (though well-deserved in all these cases) is that it is based on, and perpetuates, a false distinction between creative-writers-turned-translators and translators, when in fact all translators are creative writers by definition. In other art forms, interpreters are not nearly as modest. Douglas Hofstadter is right to wonder: “Why should a good literary translator be any more humble than such famously self-effacing souls as Vladimir Horowitz or Luciano Pavarotti?”
Of course, embodied interpreters, like singers, are more disposed to celebrity because they are physically visible to audiences. But this isn’t a closed case for translators. Many are approximating the power of physical presence by initiating relationships with readers beyond the translated text. In her Italian-language memoir, In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahiri describes falling in love with Italian, the first step in her career as a translator. Jennifer Croft’s recent memoir, Homesick, is a meditation on life as a translator. These kinds of texts offer a personal background against which to read all of Lahiri’s and Croft’s ensuing translations. It seems that translators, like other performers, cannot separate their art from their lives. By relating to them as we do to other celebrated artists, we begin to see them as creative individuals. We can develop affinities to certain translators, not because we know the source language and believe they produce technically superior work, but because we are drawn to their voices and stories.
So, as translators appear to us in a hundred different shapes, let’s hold them to us. As they shapeshift, inhabiting different authors’ works, let’s listen for their voices. Let’s trust them to guide our literary tastes. Let’s adore them.
