An Avant-Garde Translator was asked what the best translation strategy would be for getting a brilliant source text canonized as World Literature.
“Hyper- or countercanonized?” the Avant-Garde Translator asked, invoking David Damrosch’s distinction (perhaps not entirely ingenuously).
“Hypercanonized, of course,” the Questioner replied. “That is after all the path to World Literature.”
“I see,” said the Avant-Garde Translator, with an edge in their voice. “Then I would say on balance the best strategy is to aggravate target readers, in hopes of provoking countercanonization.”
“But that would mean rejecting the path to World Literature,” the Questioner protested.
“Exactly,” said the Avant-Garde Translator.
2.
“I ask you how to get in,” the Questioner griped, “and your answer is about trying not to get in.”
“No,” the Avant-Garde Translator said. “My answer is about not trying.”
“What, not trying to translate the work brilliantly? Or even competently? Letting the translation spill out onto the screen willy-nilly?”
“No,” the Avant-Garde Translator said. “I would try to aggravate the reader. I would not try to break into World Literature.”
3.
“If your aim is to aggravate the target reader,” the Questioner mused, “does that mean your ideal is a foreignizing strategy that enhances the translator’s visibility?”
“Not at all,” said the Avant-Garde Translator.
“But then,” the Questioner said, looking puzzled, “how do you aggravate the target reader and yet remain invisible?”
“I don’t understand the question,” said the Avant-Garde Translator.
“It is well known,” explained the Questioner patiently, as if to a child, “that a submissive, self-abnegating translatorial stance aims at fluency on target-cultural terms, so that target readers will feel at home in the translation, because it challenges none of their expectations. Aggravation would seem to be at odds with that goal.”
“Oh, it is,” the Avant-Garde Translator nodded.
“But then . . . ?”
4.
“Where I live,” the Avant-Garde Translator said, “asking whether translators are insufficiently visible and should work to enhance their visibility sounds a lot like asking whether translators are insufficiently heroic and should enhance their reputation for heroism.”
“But putting it that way does make it seem,” the Questioner said, “as if you’re promoting the translator’s subservient invisibility.”
“It seems like that to Questioners with binary blinkers on, maybe,” said the Avant-Garde Translator.
5.
“Spell it out for me, please,” the Questioner said.
“Imagine that World Literature is a grand old mansion with many lovely rooms,” the Avant-Garde Translator said.
“Okay,” said the Questioner.
“Imagine that the entrance to that house is guarded by a fierce three-headed dog.”
“What, Cerberus? World Literature is Hades now?”
“Whatever. A scary monster of some sort.”
“Okay.”
“And to break into that house, a literary work needs a hero to defeat that monster.”
“Gotcha.”
“And that hero is the translator.”
“Oh. I see where you’re going.”
“There is a real place with real protection, and to break in, a literary work needs a real hero to take real heroic action.”
“That’s a little extreme, maybe.”
“Maybe. But it’s implied in your assumptions.”
“How so?”
“You want to ‘get into World Literature.’”
“Yes, so?”
6.
“Okay, I get it,” the Questioner admitted after a moment’s reflection. “World Literature isn’t a house that you break into; it’s a state of mind. It’s a rhetorical construct. It’s an audience-effect.”
“That’s a good start,” the Avant-Garde Translator said.
“David Damrosch says it’s a collection of reading practices.”
“Sure. Except that it’s not just one collection. It’s thousands. Tens of thousands. And they keep shifting across time and space.”
“So if it’s not a place that you ‘get into,’” the Questioner said, “how shall we talk about the process by which some work—say a work that you’re translating—comes to be hypercanonized as World Literature?”
“No idea,” the Avant-Garde Translator said. “It’s not a subject that interests me much.”
“Whyever not? You have translated novels that you consider brilliant, deserving of widespread admiration.”
“I have, yes. And hope to do it some more.”
“Then—?”
“I’m happy to talk about strategies for getting target readers’ attention. Not about how that attention will propel the books I translate into World Literature.”
7.
“So let’s talk about those strategies for getting target readers’ attention,” the Questioner agreed.
“Okay,” the Avant-Garde Translator said. “Think about it like this. The case for enhancing the translator’s visibility, which is to say heroizing the translator, rests on an individualized conception of art. In that conception there are winners and losers, perpetrators and victims. If the translator isn’t visible enough, if they get treated as an unheroic functionary who simply reproduces the source text in the target language, if the best thing a reviewer of the translation can say is that ‘it reads fluently, as if it had originally been written in the target language,’ they are a victim. All this complaining about the translator’s invisibility is victim discourse.”
8.
“So what’s the alternative?”
“There are lots of alternatives,” the Avant-Garde Translator said. “But they’re all participatory, collaborative. They’re what Alexa Alfer calls ‘translaborative.’ And they’re often anonymous. I’m thinking of crowd-sourced translations, especially. Fan-subbing. The anonymous group of fan-subtitlers forms briefly, temporarily, and voluntarily, to make something available. They don’t ask for permission. They don’t ask for money. They don’t ask for glory. They just want to do the job.”
9.
“But isn’t that just old-time translatorial invisibility?”
“Oh,” the Avant-Garde Translator smiled, “you mean subservient, self-abnegating?”
“Well, yes. That’s what it sounds like.”
“Fan-subbers are ninjas. They get in fast and get out fast. They flout international copyright laws. One ad hoc fansub group in Mainland China was recently sued for copyright infringement by the French copyright-holder. They engineer broader access for people who can’t speak or read every language in the world—and that of course is all of us. How is that subservient?”
10.
“Okay, but that’s a special case,” the Questioner said. “What about great literature? What about the brilliantly transformative literary works you love to translate?”
“Last year I translated a book for a major New York publisher. The editor I worked with was quite brilliant, an excellent editor and something of an editorial activist, but she had two significant limitations: first, she was bound by her employer’s commercial mission to sell as many books as possible, which on the face of it put her at odds with the impulses of an Avant-Garde Translator to aggravate the reader; but second, she knew not one word of the source language, and that left me lots of leeway.”
“Leeway to do what?”
“Practice ninja translation.”
“For example?”
“I was able to smuggle all kinds of anarchistic exuberance into the translation, and she was none the wiser. The disruptive fun I was having wasn’t egregious enough to ring her alarm bells, and she wasn’t able to check my innovations against the source text.”
“But then it was just secret fun? You were the only one who knew about it?”
“Of course not,” the Avant-Garde Translator smiled. “The source author read English very well. And she was one of these wonderful writers who somehow manage to channel their own anarchistic exuberance into popular books.”
“So she noticed your ninja translations?”
“Naturally! She mostly loved them. The only ones she wanted me to change were the ones where I didn’t push hard enough, didn’t take a big enough risk.”
“So the two of you were the only ones who noticed? The editor never caught you?”
“She would occasionally tone a phrasing down slightly. I could live with that.”
“And you had no desire to strut your stuff?”
“I did strut my stuff,” the Avant-Garde Translator said. “With the source author. She and I worked together. Alfer says that all translation is translaboration. All translators collaborate with various people. Every translation is a participatory group effort. I loved working with that source author for those six months, and I’ve been able to translate a few short pieces for her since then as well. We had tea across the same table about halfway through the project. She was this shy type with a wicked gleam in her eye. That wicked gleam was recognition enough.”
11.
“And what have the reviewers said about your translation?”
“That it’s fluent,” the Avant-Garde Translator said evenly. “That it reads as if it had originally been written in English.”
“And that doesn’t annoy you?”
“Why should it?”
“Because it undervalues the creativity that went into translating the book! Because it demeans your very identity as a creative human being!”
“Identity is not only a myth—it’s a harmful myth. Down with identity! Long live anarchistic anonymity! Long live ninja invisibility!”
12.
“Not to mention,” the Questioner said, with just the tiniest hint of a sneer in their voice, “a review praising your translation as fluent is free advertising.”
“That’s right,” the Avant-Garde Translator agreed. “But you say that sarcastically. Are you suggesting that I should be ashamed of that free advertising?”
“Well,” the Questioner replied, taken aback, “it does seem at odds with an avant-garde sensibility.”
“What, to care about the possibility of being hired again?”
“That,” the Questioner nodded, “but also caring so much about being hired again that you’re willing to be puffed on false pretenses.”
“‘False’? What part of ‘ninja invisibility’ did you not understand?”
13.
“I’m getting the impression,” said the Questioner dryly, “that there is some kind of avant-garde complexity around the notion of identity.”
“The best explanation of it that I know,” said the Avant-Garde Translator, “is provided by Boris Groys”:
Here the question is not whether the true self is real or merely a metaphysical fiction. The question of identity is not a question of truth but a question of power: Who has the power over my own identity—I myself or society? And, more generally: Who exercises control and sovereignty over the social taxonomy, the social mechanisms of identification—state institutions or I myself? The struggle against my own public persona and nominal identity in the name of my sovereign persona or sovereign identity also has a public, political dimension because it is directed against the dominating mechanisms of identification—the dominating social taxonomy, with all its divisions and hierarchies. Later, these artists mostly gave up the search for the hidden, true self. Rather, they began to use their nominal identities as ready-mades—and to organize a complicated play with them. But this strategy still presupposes a disidentification from nominal, socially codified identities—with the goal of artistically reappropriating, transforming, and manipulating them. The politics of modern and contemporary art is the politics of nonidentity. Art says to its spectator: I am not what you think I am (in stark contrast to: I am what I am). The desire for nonidentity is, actually, a genuinely human desire—animals accept their identity but human animals do not.
14.
“Um, all right,” allowed the Questioner. “But what does it mean to use one’s nominal identity as a ready-made? Can you give me an example?”
“Well, another translaboration of ‘mine’ that came out recently involved a novel left unfinished by the author at his death. I used my nominal identity—you know, the ‘Douglas Robinson’ identity, which lives in Hong Kong and so on—as a ready-made, and called myself the book’s transcreator.”
“What, transcreation as play with identity?”
“I suppose, in a way. What’s interesting in that book, though, is that the author wrote the novel—well, the first twenty-four and a half chapters of it, until he had the debilitating stroke that prevented him from finishing it before he died—in Finnish, but claimed that he found the eighteenth-century English manuscript and translated it into Finnish. Author as translator: that’s the first play with authorial identity as a ready-made. I translated the part he wrote into eighteenth-century English, but claimed that I too found the same original English manuscript and simply edited it. That’s the second play: translator as editor. Grabbing the author’s epistemological baton and running with it. I also wrote the unfinished novel to the ending that the author told his son he was planning, but pretended that the part he authored was in the original manuscript: author as editor, the third play. On top of all that, though, I made the translator/author-as-editor character—a professor in Hong Kong named Douglas Robinson—paranoid, and a bit confused, and half-convinced that the Venusians that I wrote into the ending of the novel were real. My nominal identity—name, profession, place of residence—twisted, warped, fictionalized into a kind of transcreatorial Kinbote. I also included a ‘reader’s report’ by a fictitious Finnish scholar who angrily attacked ‘me’ for perpetrating the thieving ‘hoax’ that I only edited the book, rather than translating and authoring it; and I turned one of the characters in the novel into a time-traveler who served as the book’s ‘publisher’ (and masqueraded as Ezra Pound, and was married to a Venusian princess). That kind of ready-made.”
15.
“I’m not sure I follow,” the Questioner said slowly. “Maybe I’m getting this wrong. But doesn’t Boris Groys highlight the artistic movement beyond using nominal identities as ready-mades? Doesn’t he insist that that play that you point out in your translaboration/transcreation ‘still presupposes a disidentification from nominal, socially codified identities—with the goal of artistically reappropriating, transforming, and manipulating them’? Doesn’t he stress that modern art ‘is’—or should be—‘the politics of nonidentity’?”
“You’re right,” the Avant-Garde Translator said. “My postmodern, Pale Fire-inspired transcreation would not necessarily represent the highest level of avant-garde nonidentity. Groys adds, though, that avant-garde art ‘says to its spectator: I am not what you think I am.’ Avant-garde translation (and transcreation) says the same thing. That is a kind of avant-garde invisibility.”
16.
“And what would the implications of this avant-garde approach to translating be for World Literature?” the Questioner asked.
“Maybe the same as for World Health,” the Avant-Garde Translator said. “Or for the World Economy.”
“What, none at all?”
“Not necessarily,” replied the Avant-Garde Translator. “Maybe there’s some connection in each case. Maybe they’re all part of the same global dissipative system, where a butterfly flaps its wings in a novel and a global pandemic and recession results. But if there is a connection like that, it doesn’t interest me. My translaboration crew translates to aggravate our target readers. What those readers do with their aggravation is their business.”
“So in the end you don’t even hope for countercanonization?”
“Oh, well,” the Avant-Garde Translator said. “Sure, that would be nice. But it’s out of our hands. That would be a ripple effect way down the line. We try to focus on more tangible results.”
