PALGRAVE STUDIES IN TRANSLATING AND INTERPRETING SERIES EDITOR: MARGARET ROGERS The Experimental Translator Douglas Robinson Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting Series Editor Margaret Rogers School of Literature and Languages University of Surrey Guildford, UK This series examines the crucial role which translation and interpreting in their myriad forms play at all levels of communication in today’s world, from the local to the global. Whilst this role is being increasingly recog- nised in some quarters (for example, through European Union legisla- tion), in others it remains controversial for economic, political and social reasons. The rapidly changing landscape of translation and interpreting practice is accompanied by equally challenging developments in their academic study, often in an interdisciplinary framework and increasingly reflecting commonalities between what were once considered to be sepa- rate disciplines. The books in this series address specific issues in both translation and interpreting with the aim not only of charting but also of shaping the discipline with respect to contemporary practice and research. Douglas Robinson The Experimental Translator Douglas Robinson Chinese University of Hong Kong Shenzhen, China ISSN 2947-5740 ISSN 2947-5759 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting ISBN 978-3-031-17940-2 ISBN 978-3-031-17941-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17941-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface 1 My title, The Experimental Translator, is a provocation, of course—but not an unprecedented one. In “Where Is My Desire?” Chantal Wright (2020) launched a similar provocation, insisting that “Translation needs to be sexier. It needs to be more creative, more experimental; it needs an avant-garde. It needs to jam, and see what comes out in the wash.” I have taken these words to heart—not only here in this book but in the experimental translations that energize it. Chantal Wright also directed me to Lily Robert-Foley’s (2020) article “The Politics of Experimental Translation,” which draws on a half-c entury or more of translational experiments, and to the onslaught of mono- graphs on this topic from Clive Scott, including at least Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (2012a), Translating the Perception of Text (2012b), and The Work of Literary Translation (2018), which harks back to the experimental writing of Apollinaire and Mallarmé. Those works might arguably impart a kind of inevitability to my topic and title—even a kind of finality, as in what else could there possibly be to say? But of course despite these provocations, “translation” at large in soci- ety remains at once subservient and sacrosanct. More precisely, the source v vi Preface text remains sacrosanct in its inimitable brilliance and what remains sac- rosanct in its translation is only the subservient preservation (though with some unfortunate diminishment, sigh) of that brilliance. The trans- lation is the handmaiden to brilliance; it has no claim to brilliance. 2 That last paragraph is of course the quasi-religious mythos of translation that the “experimental” provocateurs assault—and that mythos, precisely because it protects the sanctity of the great (literary) work of art, is itself well-protected. In a 2014 review of Scott (2012a, b), for example, Adam Piette offers a somewhat grudging acceptance of the inventive experimentality that Scott champions, only pausing briefly to call this or that experimental translation “an extraordinary mélange of text, environmental baggage, and white noise” (425) or “a mess” (427)1 and then in his final paragraph gets right down to it: This brings me to the crux of my problem with the two books: the concept “experimental,” though brave, colorful, theoretically lively, liberating in and of itself, is used in practice to “forget” the original in ways that do not foreground the textual, performative, or environmental processes/contexts of production so much as point towards the translator as master- juggler. (427) That’s the crime: “‘forget[ting]’ the original.” Experimental translation as foregrounding the brilliance not of the source text but of “the transla- tor as master-juggler.” He goes on: “This is not narcissistic, necessarily, but it takes a while to task oneself, let us say, not to think of Harold Bloom when the originals 1 In another place Piette illustrates “texting into the performance poem speech collected from the event itself” with two parenthetical examples, a hierarchical territorialization and a taboo profana- tion: “(‘Don’t push me’, or ‘with cream?’ muscling into the sacred space of the original poem)” (2014: 426). Those “muscles” are patently the muscles of the mundane, the profane space of ordi- nary colloquial transactions that have no business in the “sacred space” of art. Preface vii are defaced, scribbled over, and twisted from their original trajectories” (427). Presumably what he means there by “Harold Bloom” is not the crabby old man resentfully bemoaning the usurpation of white male priv- ilege by feminists and multiculturalists in The Western Canon (Bloom 1994; see Robinson 2017d: Chapter 2) but the two anxiously influential little books of the mid-1970s, The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misprision (1975). But see Sections 24–26 of Chapter 2 and 1–4 of Chapter 3, below, for a close look at Jonathan Lethem’s (2007) retort to Bloom, “The Ecstasy of Influence”—not to mention the ἔκστασιν ἄγει(ν)/ékstasin ágei(n) “driv- ing us out of ourselves” of Longinus on the sublime. As I argue in “Translator, Touretter: Avant-Garde Translation and the Touretter Sublime” (Robinson Unpub.) that “ecstatic” experience of being driven out of oneself is one of the goals of the avant-garde—and of course the anxiety of that ecstasy that more conservative readers feel helps power the backlash against experimental translation. 3 A little more of that backlash from Piette: Too much commentary on the translation procedure, and too little sensi- tivity to the speech act of the original, well, God knows the majority of books on translation theory are guilty of that. Yet here, the darker sides to experimental reworking of the speech of the other are too often glided over towards a celebratory model for the radical reworkings. (427) The other is other; the self is the self. Each is a separate monad that must be kept inviolate—except, of course, when the self is a translator. Then that self must relinquish the impulse to be respected as an inviolate other by either the source author or the target reader. The translator’s task is to subsume the self in the wonderfulness of the other. The idea that the translator’s “radical reworkings” might be celebrated as “the other,” even and especially by those restless source authors who, like Jonathan Lethem, love precisely the ecstatic experience of being driven out of themselves, is viii Preface simply unavailable to Piette. Any kind of deviation from the source text is “the darker side”: It is characteristic that it is Merleau-Ponty who is the guardian spirit of the transactions, for instance, with his upbeat ecstatic sense of the cheerful, sensual interplay of percipient, object, and perceptual world; and not, say, Freud, who might have seen, in some of the inkblot scribbling overwriting manner, symptoms of endopsychic aggrandissement. Or perhaps signs of what Sartre would analyse under the banner of the factitious transcendence of mauvaise foi. Mother tongues tempt the mind to do much harm to father-texts. (427) There it is: the Freudian family romance, or what Deleuze and Guattari called the daddy-mommy-me. As Jacques Lacan insists, of course, the daddy is the source and embodiment of the No of the Law: do not harm the father-text! And the mommy is a mess: a mélange of imaginary anxiety, cannibalistic impulses to devour and excrete the child,2 desires to possess the child as a symbolic penis, unrepresentable chaos—and, why not, white noise as well. The translator too, in Piette’s translational take on that romance, must renounce the mother (tongue) and adhere to the father-text’s prohibitory law. 4 In The Work of Literary Translation Scott offers this account of his theori- zations and practice of experimental translation over the previous decade: Translation is an exploration, palpation and inscription into the source text (ST), of readerly consciousness, and this involves not only finding a form adequate to that consciousness – a search which, for me, covers the gamut from free verse (Scott 2000), in the wake of Yves Bonnefoy’s practice, to different kinds of tabular and multi-medial disposition—but also wresting translation from the monopoly of the monoglot reader (with its narrow 2 For the “cannibalistic” metaphor/theory of translation coming out of Brazil, see Vieira (1994, 1999). Preface ix constraints of fidelity and reliability) and retrieving it for a polyglot reader, able to read the ST. (2018: 2) Noting the serendipitous convergence between his title The Work of Literary Translation and Derek Attridge’s (2015) The Work of Literature, he also draws attention to the divergences: What is more properly different is the fact that translation requires us to go beyond the “willed/active passivity” or “exposure” (Attridge 2015, 2–4) of reception, and to reinvent the ST’s inventiveness, knowing that it cannot be the same, that we must capture it in a new dimension, or frankly dis- place or relocate it. Besides, the notions of inventiveness and the other will themselves have another dimension: as translators, our encounter with a foreign language has nothing to do with ‘pleasurable exoticism’, but with a profound perceptual otherness; we would be unwise to call this particular ‘otherness’ cultural, since we so easily inhabit it, more acutely perhaps than native speakers. (2) Unlike Attridge’s grounding in source texts that have accrued the insti- tutional but deeply affective “sacrality” that the culture (and Piette along with it) assigns to them, with implicit hierarchies of “good” and “bad” reading and readers, too, Scott underscores the mutability that transla- tion inevitably brings to literature: Translation is unavoidably transformative, restores literary making to flux, melting or diversifying categorial boundaries, reinventing the processes of reading, expecting that each new version of a ST will re-position us, throw- ing into question the methods and knowledges that institutional practice might regard as maximally appropriate. Where, for Attridge, it is “in responding to the handling of form that the reader of a literary work brings it into being as literature” (Attridge 2015, 267), translation is, for me, in its search for literariness, hostile to achieved form and is concerned with com- posing the decomposition of the ST, by metamorphosis and/or by mon- tage …, that is, by continuous formal variation and/or by the repeated disaggregation of form into assembled, volatile fragments. (3)