Twisted Tongues, Tied Hands: Translation Studies and the English Major
Emily O Wittman, Katrina Windon. College English. Urbana: May 2010. Vol. 72, Iss. 5; pg. 449, 21 pgs
Abstract (Summary)
When Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn edited Redrawing the Boundaries in 1992, neither translation
studies nor world literature appeared among the new directions surveyed in the series of essays they compiled
to map the expanding horizons of English and American studies. The 'Right,' Presumed and Privileged, to
Translate, explored the interface between ideas of two of the theorists we discussed-Benjamin's romantic
notion of chosen translators and the ideal pursuit of a pure language, and Venuti's grounded discussion of the
copyright laws and publishing commissions that shape the modern translating world-by exploring the manners
in which translation has been regulated and legislated, and those laws and regulations broken (Benjamin 76).
Copyright National Council of Teachers of English Conference on College Composition and Communication
May 2010
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.
-Baruch Spinoza
The emergent field of translation studies is still struggling to find a home in American universities in a time of
severely strained budgets and overextended departments. Drawn to the issue, as professor (Emily O. Wittman)
and as undergraduate (Katrina Windon), by the experience of a successful inaugural introductory course at the
University of Alabama, we have found that a fruitful place for translation studies to gestate is under the watchcare of the often monolingual English department, although interdepartmental cooperation would certainly
further the experience. Our careful attention to Lawrence Venuti's call for a "pedagogy of translated literature"
in graduate programs in English persuades us that a translation studies course should also be mandatory for all
undergraduate English majors ("Translation and the Pedagogy" 331). In this essay, we propose our course as
a model of an undergraduate translation studies course, identifying the texts, the theories, and even the
tangents necessary to make such a course relevant to the department, the student, and the future of English
studies.
Although the incorporation of world literatures into the Anglo-American canon of the English department is past
the proverbial point of no return, we still have a long way to travel beyond the confines of canonical European
literature; so many national languages and literatures are seldom translated, let alone anthologized. A related
issue then arises: what is the often monolingual American undergraduate expected to do with a translation?
Knowing how to read a translation in a productive and informed manner is a vital skill, yet it is rarely found in
English departments' mission statements, or among syllabus course objectives. We submit that the study of
translation is too important to relegate to the nonmandatory electives that Victoria Rosner so aptly terms "Not
the Main Story" (59).
In 1827 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote to his friend Johann Peter Eckermann, "Nowadays, national
literature doesn't mean much: world literature is beginning and everybody should hasten its advent" (qtd. in
Moretti 54). When Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn edited Redrawing the Boundaries in 1992, neither
translation studies nor world literature appeared among the new directions surveyed in the series of essays
they compiled to map the expanding horizons of English and American studies. Yet Greenblatt and Gunn
counsel readers that "if this map is redrawn-as it should be in another decade or so-it will undoubtedly possess
a noticeably different appearance" (10). Most English departments are still divided neatly into area coverage of
American and English literature, the trendy amalgam of "transatlantic studies" notwithstanding. Nevertheless, if
that map were redrawn today, it would need to make room for studies of translation theory and world literature,
increasingly seen as necessary components of English departments across the United States. A number of
reasons account for this, including the shrinking of foreign-language departments and the progressive
globalization of English departments due, at least in part, to increasing doubts about nationality as the best or
only way to organize literature courses.
No more, Wai Chee Dimock observes, can we "assum[e] a one-to-one correspondence between the
geographic origins of a text and its evolving radius of literary action." For, far from being "the linguistic
equivalents of territorial maps," national literatures have no defined borders, legal or linguistic, and when we
factor in translation, the borders become ever more elastic (175). The most nationalistic of texts does not
belong to that nation alone; the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland, directly inspired the Estonian equivalent,
the Kalevipoeg-and, by means of a German translation, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Hiawatha (Barret 223).
Looking from source text to translation and back necessarily involves a consideration of the position of Englishlanguage literature in a larger, even global, context. Reading in and about translation significantly enriches our
understanding of the genealogy of texts and encourages us to think about the way that original texts are often
obfuscated through translation. After all, many of these English-language texts have their basis in non-English
works, and are therefore inextricably tied to an international literary tradition that produced the first novel long
before English "first" contenders. English Renaissance poets like Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey, perennials in introductory British literature surveys, can hardly be imagined apart from their Petrarchan
influence. American literature itself has never been a purely monolingual affair, from Native American texts to
the immigrant texts of the present. The very existence of works like Marc Shell and Werner Sollors's The
Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, an anthology with side-by-side texts and translations, highlights
the difficulty of drawing firm distinctions between foreign and domestic literature.
Evaluations of competing translations require the closest of readings. At the same time, just as significantly,
they force us to stand back with our new knowledge and consider, at a remove, the literature that we
traditionally read and teach. The study of translation, when done right, can debunk the myth of a text's
unchanging identity by inviting us to consider how its complex, multiple, and often international or intralinguistic
origins are often palimpsested through multiple translations. Reading translations entails the kind of truffle
hunting required for close reading, but also the use of a wider optic, one that allows us to sight what Terry
Eagleton argues is "held at bay" by the practice of reading great works of literature "in isolation" (44).
Universities across the country have incorporated courses and programs in translation studies in a variety of
ways. Surveying these courses and programs, we have found everything from introductory courses in theory to
workshops, certificate programs, and full degree programs.1 The goals of such courses run from the purely
pragmatic (translator training) to the purely theoretical. The course that we describe in this essay falls
somewhere in between, with the objective of teaching students how to read translations and how, if they
choose, to attempt their own.
1. Organizing the Course
Our course was offered as a cross-listed undergraduate/graduate course with the following catalogue
description:
This course offers an introduction to the history of translation practices through a study of critical essays from
Jerome and Dryden to Benjamin and Derrida, as well as comparative analysis of English-language translations.
Class time will be divided between analysis of theoretical writing and evaluative discussion of competing
English-language translations. This course will demonstrate that the history of English literature would have
been different, if not impossible, without the efforts of countless translators, many of them anonymous. One of
the goals of the course is to make students aware of central issues in the burgeoning field of translation
studies, including the social and economic factors that come into play whenever we ferry texts between
languages, cultures, and eras. The methods and procedures that we study will lead to discussions about
gender, poetics, ideology, class, and nation. We will devote particular attention to the changing valences of the
key concept of equivalence. Over the course of the semester we will explore the practice and consequences of
literary translation, learning about the role translations play in the interpretation and consecration of literature.
Twenty-two students enrolled, half of them undergraduate English majors and minors, and the other half
graduate students, primarily from the PhD, MA, and MFA programs in English. Essays from The Translation
Studies Reader, edited by Venuti, anchored the course with weekly theory readings ranging from Jerome to
Jacques Derrida. As outlined in the syllabus, assignments included a twenty-minute presentation on a specific
translation or cluster of translations, a midterm examination requiring a comparative evaluation of three
translations of Sappho, a six-page midsemester paper on Walter Benjamin and John Keats's poem "On First
Looking into Chapman's Homer," and a final project, to be drawn up in concert with the professor.
As the course was offered in the English department, I (which hereafter refers to Emily) did not mandate a
foreign language requirement. Because English majors at the University of Alabama, like many of their
counterparts at peer institutions, have a four-semester foreign language requirement, I could have made
completion of the departmental requirement a prerequisite. But this would likely have reduced enrollment and,
in any case, would not have led to a classroom of students proficient in the same second language. There are
certain tangible advantages to specifying prior language knowledge, but there is also a clear need across the
board for the study of translation, perhaps especially for the monolingual student who will read foreign
literatures exclusively in translation. In this pilot course, I found that an advanced command of a foreign
language was preferable, but not essential. However, I was delighted to discover that my students had studied
and occasionally mastered a broad variety of languages. There were two advanced students of Japanese, one
native German speaker, several students with an advanced command of Spanish or French, a handful who had
studied Italian, and two with an advanced command of Latin. English majors are rarely invited to apply their
language study to their major; a translation studies course will help bridge that gap and enhance both fields of
study. As one student concluded in her final paper, "Overall, I think I have learned more between languages
than I ever could in just one language."
I created a course wiki (more specifically, a PBwiki, now known as PBworks), a Web forum consisting of a
collection of Web pages that is designed to enable anyone with access to it to contribute or modify content. I
was the administrator for this home-accessible forum-well suited to foster collaborative work and facilitate
information sharing among learners. Our wiki, "Found in Translation," allowed every member of the class to
post pre-presentation readings, commentary, and links to supplementary course materials, such as translations
of Paul Celan's "Todesfuge" ("Death Fugue"), with a link to a YouTube video recording of Celan reading his
poem in the original German. The wiki provided a forum for students to continue class discussions in an
informal manner, and it also hosted class assignments. Technology has fueled globalization worldwide; it is
fitting that technology should also facilitate the globalization of English departments.
This course offered many students their first introduction to the study of translation. "I'd read things in
translation," one student wrote in an anonymous midterm evaluation, "but never once had I given the slightest
attention to the translator's name (let alone considered rereading it in another translation), and had given only
the barest consideration to the idea that the work was in fact a translation, and not the original." Each student
brought his or her own unique set of assumptions (for instance, Katrina's assumption that faithfulness was
every translator's primary goal). The English undergraduate is taught to read between the lines for subtexts and
symbols; attending to a text's translated status requires additional angles of approach. At stake is our
understanding that behind an English translation, however domesticated, lies a foreign text whose translation is
more than a mere transliteration.2
There is no definitive textbook for translation studies at the undergraduate level, just as there is no definitive
course. Readings from The Translation Studies Reader sparked a range of reactions: curiosity, pique
(regarding Vladimir Nabokov3), or perplexity (regarding Benjamin, at least at first glance). The Translation
Studies Reader moves chronologically through translation theory rather than melding the chronological with the
conceptual in organizational strategy. The result is a linear and logical academic progression that introduces
students to translation studies by means of crucial selections from the history of writing about translation. A
helpful introductory essay by the editor supplements each cluster of selections. Our course readings often
required a theoretical and philosophical grounding that most students did not have; this necessitated a fair
amount of accelerated "catching up" on new conceptual vocabulary in class. In contrast, Jeremy Munday's
Introducing Translation Studies is a more traditional textbook, offering boxes with key concepts and
chapterending review questions. Considering Munday's own conclusion that a key reason for translation
studies' original marginalization is that the "[s]tudy of a work in translation was generally frowned upon once the
student had acquired the necessary skills to read the original" (8), we can see the advantage of Venuti's
approach for garnering academic respect. Nevertheless, at the undergraduate level, we believe that it would be
helpful to begin the course with an overview of terms and concepts geared toward the lay student. Once
exposed, students in the class gamely wrestled with the theory, embracing the opportunity to do further
research for class presentations and final projects, and garnering the theoretical tools to do so.
2. Classical and Sacred Texts in Translation: Celebrated Translations
Several selected readings and presentations explored the translation of sacred texts. We carefully considered a
number of the key places in the New Testament where the Hebrew Bible is allegorized, and participated in
comparative presentations on the Song of Songs and Job. Passions run wild when readers compare the merits
of Edward Fitzgerald's and Robert Fagles's translations of Homer, but the topic of biblical translation seemed
potentially delicate in the so-called Bible Belt. How would discussions go in a classroom in which a variety of
views were represented, during a period when cultural and religious issues in this country were as fraught with
tension as ever?
My apprehension was misplaced; in fact, several students' strong knowledge of various translations of the New
Testament and related translations of the Hebrew Bible turned out to be an unexpected and welcome
advantage. Many of our course readings, including the first and the last (Jerome's "Letter to Pammachius" and
Derrida's "What Is a 'Relevant' Translation?"), deal, to some extent, with the translation of Jewish texts for a
Christian readership. Our related discussions aroused curiosity and informed commentary, but not controversy.
In fact, our discussions of sacred texts were among the most productive of our course, as they vividly
demonstrated the stakes of translation. For evidence of the influence of translation on English and American
literature, we need look no further than the translations of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The
wording and poetic meter of the King James Bible (1611), as well as William Tyndale's unfinished English
translations (1520s through 1530s)-from which the King James version draws significantly-continue to inflect
our daily speech and influence countless writers, just as they previously influenced writers from William
Shakespeare to William Wordsworth and e. e. cummings. "Getting Tyndale out of my head seems to me
impossible," Harold Bloom wrote recently of the sixteenth-century scholar who burned on the stake for heresy.
"We go about daily-many of us-unknowingly repeating sentences, phrases, and words invented as much by
Tyndale as by Shakespeare" (20).
Many student presentations focused on canonical writers, including Dante, Catullus, and Homer. We discussed
how these classical texts have been translated in an evolving manner that crafts them into new iterations for
every generation, in an "ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering" (Benjamin 77). Particularly valuable
class discussions occurred when students sat in on contemporary critical debates, such as those that pit the
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky team's new translations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and
Ivan Turgenev against Constance Garnett's earlier translations-the translations for nearly a century. As we
compared and evaluated Garnett's translations, we realized that they are also documents in literary history,
important intertexts that no amount of Penguin Group dollars can erase. This led us to discuss the way in which
many staple historical arcs and genealogies of literary studies leave out histories of translation. We may jump
on the critical bandwagon and accompany the New Yorker and New York Review of Books in slaying the
"genteel face of tireless industry" every time Pevear and Volkhonsky translate another Russian novel, but it
was Garnett's translations of the Russians that influenced writers including Ernest Hemingway, D. H.
Lawrence, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad (Remnick). Orlando Figes notes, "For the English-reading public,
Russian literature was what Garnett made of it. As Joseph Conrad wrote in 1917, 'Turgeniev for me is
Constance Garnett and Constance Garnett is Turgeniev'" (4). For at least one student in our class, this was
indeed the case-she'd fallen in love with Garnett's translation of Turgenev's First Love, and on an emotional
level, other translations paled in comparison. When considered amid side-by-side excerpts from competing
translations of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, Garnett triumphed in our class straw poll.
One student chose another text with a larger-than-life translator as a presentation topic-The Thousand and One
Nights. An essay by Jorge Luis Borges in The Translation Studies Reader, "The Translators of The One
Thousand and One Nights," explores Jean Antoine Galland's translation of The Thousand and One Nights into
French. Galland took the liberty of including many stories not found in the original, stories that "time would
render indispensable and that translators to come-his enemies-would not dare omit" (Borges 95).
Contemporaneous English writers-of an era and education that prepared them to read the stories in the
French-famously preferred Galland's early eighteenth-century translations, so that, though "[t]wo hundred years
and ten better translations have passed, [. . .] the man in Europe or the Americas who thinks of The Thousand
and One Nights thinks, invariably, of this first translation," highly popular and greatly enjoyed despite being
"[w]ord for word [. . .] the most poorly written of them all, the least faithful, and the weakest" (Borges 95).
Borges assigns no blame to Galland, the casualty, like Garnett, of changing language and literary fashions.4
Although he knew many languages, Ralph Waldo Emerson often preferred to read in translation, in the belief
that great books are made great through successive translations, through the "wide social labor that brings a
work to perfection" (Literary Criticism 169).5 "[T]he world takes liberties with world books," he wrote in his
essay "Shakespeare; or the Poet." The Bible, the Vedas, Aesop's Fables, The Lay of the Cid-none, Emerson
noted, are "the work of single men" (169). He himself took a few such liberties, trying his hand at Dante's Vita
Nuova, as well as several Persian poems (his "dried Persian leaves"), which he translated from Joseph von
Hammer Purgstall's German translations (Letters 248-9). Emerson's stance, which shifts depending on text,
translator, and time, is complicated; although he valorizes the labor and fruits of translation, he insists that
"world books" can teach themselves, that one need not situate them in their historical context. "Not knowing
Shakespeare's history," Marjorie Garber writes, "gives Emerson his Shakespeare" (64).
Questions about various liberties taken by translators emerged repeatedly in the course. We had all read Anne
Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, but few of us knew the astonishing history of its translation. Indeed, that classic
text survived to be included in the "international reception of the story of Nazism's Jewish victims," in part
through careful and tendentious translation, while so many "testimonies that did not find a voice in translation
largely fell into oblivion" (Seidman 201). Through one student's presentation on the diary, we learned how a
translation can revise the very history it transmits, as when the German translator of Frank's diary softened
some references to Germans, and substituted euphemisms for straightforward statements: "The 'fascist' has
disappeared from the German text so as not to depress its sales," with the tacit agenda, perhaps, that if a
certain horror isn't translated, perhaps it never occurred (Lefevere, Translation 68). Anne Frank had to be
refashioned before she became a household name.
3. Reading in Translation: Broadening the Discussion
Other presentations brought our attention to translations of lesser-known texts (for example, Andrew Lang's
Fairy Books), and also to translations of well-known, but less canonical sources, such as an Italian translation
of The Jungle Book. When modern updating of works seems precious (translating Dr. Seuss into Latin, for
example), the academic value at the university level may appear suspect, but the discussion value is valid;
taking a children's book as subject matter in no way eases the task of the translator, but rather brings up its
own unique considerations that may be useful for discussion. How should nonsense words be dealt with? Do
illustrations ever need translation? That translation occasionally ties into the zeitgeist does not undermine its
academic nature, but rather highlights its pervasiveness.
Discussions of dialects, regional speech, code-switching, and hybridity led us to reflect on the kinds of
translation that we practice and encounter daily as we navigate the English language. These reflections tied
into our appraisal of innovative translations, translations that do not fit into a neat, "foreign" versus "domestic"
dichotomy. For example, while contemplating teaching various translations of the Aristophanes comedy
Lysistrata, David Damrosch highlights the heuristic significance of translations that "take advantage of the fact
that there are many more forms of English than 'standard English' alone" (82). James Baldwin's incisive 1971
essay "If Black English Isn't a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?" would surely enhance these discussions in
future courses. Of particular interest in future classes at the University of Alabama might be Dudley Fitt's 1959
translation of Lysistrata, in which the Spartans speak with thick Southern accents. When do we translate from
one English (John Milton's Paradise Lost) to another (Dennis Danielson's recent translation of Paradise Lost
into contemporary English), and what are the questions occasioned by these intra-English translations? The
first of Roman Jakobson's three types of translation, this "rewording" is among the least privileged in study,
perhaps because of the implicit suggestion that one cannot read one's own language (139). Yet discussion of
translations like these can illustrate just how productive rewording can be, both in terms of making difficult
works accessible to new readers, and as a way of offering new interpretations for returning readers.
Our class discussions took us on several surprising tours through literary history and left us with many
questions. Who knew that Homer was translated into doggerel by Thomas Hobbes, that Machiavelli has been
translated as a manual for the business world, or the Lord's Prayer translated into l33t-speak? How can
Catullus be translated in so many ways, from G-rated to NC-17? Why and how did George Eliot translate
Spinoza, and what can her study of translation of Spinoza's Ethics tell us about her own ethics or philosophy?
We learned that translation involves crosspollination, that our literary fields are interdependent. We saw this, for
instance, in Emerson's aforementioned double translations of, among others, Hafiz and Rumi from the German.
These translations introduce surprising rhythms and themes: "Take my heart in thy hand, O beautiful boy of
Schiraz! / I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and Buchara!" (Collected Poems 259). Study of
these poems would surely encourage students to reflect on and revisit their knowledge of American
Romanticism. Much as a course on translation studies foregrounds what Wendy Moffat describes as the
discipline's "myth of coverage," it also pushes students to inhabit material that they have already studied (12).
Ideally, it will make their reading more sophisticated in courses to come.
4. Evaluating Translations
We found that when a translated text is read as the original, a text may be tragically misunderstood, not merely
by the translator, but also by its readers. An excellent presentation on translations and mistranslations of
Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, in conjunction with a guest lecture by Professor Metka Zupanc¡ ic¡
from the Department of Modern Languages, an experienced translator of French literature, foregrounded
issues and problems that can arise when a male translator translates a female author. In the case of Beauvoir,
a male zoologist translated the philosopher's seminal work, leading to a generation's worth of
misunderstandings and misplaced objections. As a class, we reviewed unnecessary omissions and incorrect
translations, particularly of philosophical terms. Toril Moi speculates, "Only a tome as long as the book itself
could document all the flaws in this translation" (1006).6 Unfortunately, we lacked time at the end of the
semester to read the more recent selections in Venuti's reader (by Lori Chamberlain, Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, and Keith Harvey, among others) that would surely have enhanced our discussions. However, the
issue of mistranslation and misrepresentation brought us back to questions that we raised during our
discussions of Garnett's translations. Once again, we pondered how to define a good-or at least acceptabletranslation. When is retranslation required? Do certain texts require a specific kind of fidelity?7 In the case of
The Second Sex, what should we do with the several decades of Beauvoir criticism that made use of H. M.
Parshley's flawed translation?
Despite our discussions of nuance and intent, of word choice and selective omission, class evaluations of
competing translations occasionally lingered too long on gut-level impressions: Which text sounds more
powerful? Which is more moving? Our predicament here reflects an ostensible weakness of any such course;
failing group familiarity with the original source text, our judgments were effectively based on the merits of the
translation, not as a translation but as a literary work in its own right. Benjamin would have appreciated the
truth and the irony in this predicament.
On the other hand, most of our evaluative work convinced us that reading and evaluating translations without
prior knowledge of the source language or source text can be extremely productive, though it is a discipline that
requires considerable structure. Venuti advocates comparative work, arguing that it is particularly effective
when it focuses on Jean-Jacques Lecercle's "remainder" which, in translations, "consists of textual effects that
work only in the target language, domestic linguistic forms that are added to the foreign text in the translating
process," the historical aspect of which, he suggests, is "perhaps more dramatically revealed when several
translations of a single foreign text are juxtaposed" ("Translation and the Pedagogy" 334, 337). Damrosch
likewise affirms that "comparing even brief passages can reveal a host of choices that different translators have
made," including, in particular, insight into their "literary and cultural values and their sense of their reader's
expectations" (68). Even without knowledge of the source language, "we can use translations to triangulate our
way toward a better sense of the original than any one version can give us on its own" (71). Katrina's
presentation on Ezra Pound's Cathay translations involved just such a triangulation, comparing his poems with
competing translations and with two source texts.the original poems themselves and the Ernest
Fennellosaannotated Japanese cribs that facilitated Pound's translations. Only when Katrina added a modern
crib to this mix, however, one that provided literal glosses of the Chinese, were subtleties like characters with ...
or characters with multiple meanings) made clear for the non-Chinese speaker, while still illustrating the visual
format of the original. Fair.and educated.judgments require considering not just a translation itself, but its
conditions, competitors, and context. Our comparative work in class was most effective when we replaced
initial, and perhaps inevitable, "it works/it doesn't work" judgments with evaluative discussions about how
specific translations work, or do not, as the case may be.
Venuti emphasizes that choosing a "suitable" translation means choosing one that "offers an efficient
articulation of the issues raised by translation, but also one that works productively with the critical
methodologies applied to other texts in the course" ("Translation and the Pedagogy" 341). As we studied literal
translations, homophonic translations, and the kind of experimental and risk-taking translations that correspond
to Philip Lewis's concept of abusive fidelity, we learned that an awkward or uneven translation is not
necessarily a bad one, that accuracy is not the only legitimate goal for a translation. Steven Ungar, nodding to
George Steiner, writes, "The terms 'failure' and 'incompletion' imply the persistence of a model of translation
whose virtues would entail precisely overcoming failure and incompletion" (129). The criteria by which we judge
a translation would therefore "be of less interest to Steiner than what a 'close hearing' of translation's failures
and incompletions might disclose concerning the nature of cultural difference" (129). We should thus be as
attentive to translations that read painfully as we are to those that "tell it lovely." Nabokov's resolutely literal and
fiercely protective translation of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is not easy reading, but it offers a foreign
element that a translation privileging the sensibilities of the target audience might not.
We are convinced that it would be instructive for the class to formulate its own evaluative criteria after
advancing in the theoretical readings and discussing some of the key debates in translation studies. Students
might well adopt different criteria for different kinds of texts, possibly for different genres, for religious or secular
works, or for different source languages. We thus propose that the professor distribute a rubric for evaluation
prior to such sessions in order to direct focus on the studied theories and bring the class one step closer to
Steiner's "close hearing." Students could then modify this rubric and hone their evaluative criteria over the
course of the semester as they advance in knowledge. Katrina's rubric, developed after the course (see
Appendix 1), is intended as a guide not for every reading of translation, but for a close evaluative reading, as
conducted in a classroom.
5. Translation and Globalization
With simultaneous interpretation and multilateral talks that simultaneously span continents and language
groups, technology's "linguistic marketplace" might appear to have silenced the demands and dangers of Babel
(Apter 227). YouTube offers a subtitling service, and Google translates Web pages at the click of a mouse. Yet
translation is far more than interpretation. Where interpretation makes its point and fades, the freed remainder,
the trapped Other, and the domesticated foreign remain in translated texts.8 "We might say," Eric Cheyfitz
posits, "that at the heart of every imperial fiction (the heart of darkness) there is a fiction of a translation" (15).
Translation has often served as a means of asserting national identity, especially, Cheyfitz notes, in the
Elizabethan age-an age in which the conquest of foreign domains, inclusive of their literatures, saw translation
as a means of processing and emblematizing that conquest (101). Whether imperialistic, idealistic, or simply
naïve, an approach that teaches this fiction as fact wrongs students who aren't taught to read translations as
such. This "repression of translation," Venuti argues, "makes ideas and forms appear to be free-floating,
unmoored from history, transcending the linguistic and cultural differences that required not merely their
translation in the first place, but also their interpretation in the classroom" ("Translation and the Pedagogy"
331).
We have come a long way since then, from conquering to-all too often-ignoring. Rather than usurping a
nation's literature wholesale, we often leave it in its native tongue, linguistically stranded. One of Hamar EvanZohar's laws of literary interference holds that "[a] source language is selected by prestige," and another that it
is "selected by dominance"-and that selection practice, like so many in the field of translation, and in education,
is self-perpetuating (59). More prestige is to be found in Greek than in the linguistic nether lands of Frisian, and
there is more economic sense in translating from English than from a language still struggling to develop a
literature. Translation tends to follow a diffusive pattern, flowing from areas of high concentration to those of
lower concentration, with the net result that English-language literature spreads throughout the world, but
relatively little permeates the publishing bubble from the other direction.
Over the course of the semester, we also wondered to what extent literary translations into English conform to
stylistic trends in contemporary domestic literature. Another of Evan-Zohar's laws of literary interference,
echoing Benjamin and Pound, asserts that "[i]nterference occurs when a system is in need of items unavailable
within itself" (59); nevertheless, so many translations seem geared to support the mores of the target culture.
Gunn maintains that various world literature texts widely taught and highly acclaimed, from "Mikhail Bakhtin's
Rabelais and his World [to] Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude would never have acquired the authority
they still possess if they did not reflect interests widely shared in Anglo-American literary studies" (17). The
works, of course, are still foreign, with elements that may expand English-language literature and the English
language-yet they are not chosen for these characteristics, but rather for their convergence.
6. Translation in a Global Context; Translation and World Literature
Following Moroccan writer and theorist Abdelkebir Katibi, Ungar reminds us that "all of us who study and teach
literary translation are comparatists-and even professional foreigners of sorts, in deed if not always by title"
(128). Our classroom discussions of translations of texts from a variety of national and historical traditions led
naturally into debates about the status of non-English-language literature, from the classics to the
contemporary. All of us who have taught or taken courses in which literature is read in translation are well
aware of the way in which a text's translated status is all too often invoked only to address inconsistencies or
perceived flaws, thus sidelining vital questions about the task and status of translation. Traduttore traditore, the
saying goes, but if translators do necessarily betray, we can nevertheless profit from a study of their particular
form of infidelity.
The course we propose provides students with essential conceptual tools for furthering their acquaintance with
foreign-language writers who lie outside the traditional boundaries of the English department. For this reason,
we believe that it would transition well into courses in foreign-language literature (in translation or not), as well
as world literature courses, whether they are wide-ranging "great books" courses or era-specific courses (on
the contemporary world novel, for example). At some point, Moretti suggests, our reading of foreign-language
literature must "yield to the specialist of the national literature, in a sort of cosmic and inevitable division of
labour" (66). We have found it useful to ground our thinking about contemporary world literature in the
questions raised by our translation studies course. Why is Paul Auster, although critically acclaimed
domestically, still less known in his native United States than in continental Europe, where he is translated into
French and German, among other European languages? Why do we read so little foreign-language literature in
the United States? What do we read when we do read foreign-language literature, and why? How do books
journey from their original language and country of origin to "universal recognition" on the global stage
(Casanova 354)? Do we read foreign literature with different expectations? Put bluntly, do we read to confirm or
enrich? Who are the judges for contemporary non-English-language literatures; who, that is, determines the
"evolving criteria" by means of which these literatures are judged and rewarded? (English 305).
Of course, we cannot merely append world literatures to the English department. Something has to happen to
English first. Cultivating the necessary changes means pursuing the fundamental questions and debates that
surround the contested field of world literature, questions that necessarily involve issues of translation. In her
Manifesto for Literary Studies, Marjorie Garber counsels readers that "the future importance of literary studiesand, if we care about such things, its intellectual and cultural prestige both among the other disciplines and in
the world-will come from taking risks, and not from playing it safe" (13). We propose our course in this spirit.
T.S. Eliot believed that a work's survival in foreign markets depends on its universality; although it is the
foreignness that first attracts the reader, "it will not survive unless the foreign reader recognizes, perhaps
unconsciously, identity as well as difference" (55). At the heart of many of these questions-what is translated,
what is assigned, what is read-is a deeper issue: what is wanted? Before the translations, courses, and
curricula take root, we have to relinquish some of the privileged status we give our "national" language in
curricula and coursework. English departments must, as Fredric Jameson asserts, "cultivate a new kind of
'national' inferiority complex-the inferiority complex of the super-state. [. . .]" He asks us "to train ourselves to be
vulnerable in some new and original sense, to be passive-receptive, weak, un-American, susceptible to
boundless influence by currents from foreign countries and distant cultures" (310). Translations, or the lack
thereof, may be politically motivated, but so too, Venuti proposes, may reading translations be a political
statement against publishing imbalances and inequitable practices ("How to Read" par. 20). Teaching
translation to English majors might not necessarily result in a larger translator force motivated to even out this
asymmetry. It would, however, build awareness of the issues and create an informed readership-a goal clearly
at the heart of any English department.
7. Outcomes
I conceived the translation studies course as a gateway course, and it is as such that Katrina and I now
propose it. Ideally, the study of translation plants seeds of interest that will blossom in related fields of inquiry.
This is what we saw at the conclusion of the pilot course. By the time they began their final course projects,
students had encountered a wide cross-section of non-English-language literature, from the classical to the
contemporary, as well as the history of translation theory from Jerome to Derrida. Because students typically
presented on writers they admired, their enthusiasm encouraged other students to explore and read, with the
result that several final projects grew out of other students' presentations. The study of translation thus sparked
interest in new writers, new eras, and new geographies of literature, while also cultivating a renewed interest in
canonical writers and works. "[A]lready," reads one midterm course evaluation, "the course has profoundly
impacted my reading habits for perpetuity."
Many final projects (for project guidelines see Appendix 2) grew out of class discussions and presentations,
such as those that further researched biblical translations through side-by-side comparisons. Some students,
however, sought new directions. A number of students embarked on their own translations; several followed
translation methods advocated in course readings, while a few came up with and applied their own
philosophies of translation. One student translated a passage from Lucretius five times, each following a
different translation strategy. She also included an amusing and quite instructive ex post facto analysis of a
previous translation of the same passage that she had submitted to her Latin professor two years prior.
Similarly, another student revisited several translation approaches by undertaking five different translations of
the same haiku. Following an earlier presentation on Japanese prosody, this project alerted us to some of the
frequent misperceptions that American readers have about the Japanese language as well as the haiku form.
One student translated the first chapter of a postmodern Japanese novel, while another tackled some of the
issues raised by the subtitling of foreign films, using the notoriously incomplete English subtitles of Roberto
Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945) as an object lesson. Katrina's final project, "An Illegitimate Afterlife: The
'Right,' Presumed and Privileged, to Translate," explored the interface between ideas of two of the theorists we
discussed-Benjamin's romantic notion of "chosen translators" and the ideal pursuit of a pure language, and
Venuti's grounded discussion of the copyright laws and publishing commissions that shape the modern
translating world-by exploring the manners in which translation has been regulated and legislated, and those
laws and regulations broken (Benjamin 76).
It is fitting that this pilot course took place at the University of Alabama. In 1993, fourteen years before our
translation studies course met, our university hosted the Nineteenth Alabama Symposium of English and
American Literature, described by organizer James C. Raymond as "a fitful conversation, at times a series of
monologues, sometimes convivial, sometimes hostile," organized around the question "'Is there a discipline in
this department?'" (1). Diverse scholars have historicized these divisions, demonstrating how the perpetual
quest for a fixed definition of literature has always been a feature of the discipline of English.9 Twenty years
ago, Gerald Graff and Michael Warner lobbied for coherence in literary studies "based on the recognition of
conflict rather than on a traditional consensus" (14). In Professing Literature, Graff suggests that English
departments suffer from "disconnection" between their separate parts and proposes that departments utilize
conflicts and debates to their advantage (8, 15). John Guillory's prefatory remarks to Cultural Capital are also
well suited for our proposal: "The most interesting question raised by the debate is not the familiar one of which
texts and authors will be included in the literary canon, but the question of why the debate represents a crisis in
literary study" (vii). This is particularly true in the United States where, as Franklin Court has argued, curricular
debates occasion unnecessary alarm "precisely because of the persistent misconception that the history of the
discipline is changeless, historically homogeneous, and consistent with the ideals of a valorized concept of
culture" (2).
The history of English literature is, in part, a history of translation. We believe that students should learn this at
the undergraduate level in a translation studies course. We propose that such a course be mandatory, in the
belief that it will enhance not only the learning and scholarship of the students, but also the professor who
teaches it. Even the most traditional English departments offer broad coverage; we are convinced that this
further extension will benefit student engagement with all class readings, perhaps the current syllabus
mainstays most of all. The translation studies course herein described might well mean that undergraduate
English majors finish their degrees with one course fewer in American or British literature, but it would also
mean that they understand the complexity of these designations. What we propose, then, is not merely an
introductory course, but a potential instrument of change in the way a nation reads.
[Footnote]
NOTES
1. Some notable programs and courses include Columbia University's Writing Division's Center for Literary
Translation, University of Texas-Dallas's translation workshop, and Stanford University's English department's
recently introduced undergraduate seminar in literary translation (which also uses Venuti's The Translation Studies
Reader). Princeton University recently introduced a certificate program in translation open to all majors, including
English majors who also work in a second language.
2. This is the vital remainder to which Venuti draws our attention-those extracommunicative "dialects, jargons, clichés
and slogans," the "formal elements and generic discourses" that come into play in translated works at the translator's
behest, potentially on behalf of the source text but inevitably apart from it ("Translation" 484-5).
3. A separate wiki page was created to house responses to his "Problems of Translation: Onegin in English." These
responses balanced admiration of Nabokov's intellect against frustration with his exacting and inflexible criteria.
4. One may say of Galland's text, perhaps, as the narrator does of the Weil translation whose fetching coincides with
injury to the fictional protagonist of "El Sur": that though "vinculado a la historia de su desdicha," it was also a symbol
of the end of that curse, for Galland certainly paved the way for others (even if he did so a bit concretely) (Borges
360).
5. Emerson wrote to one friend that he "ha[d] been reading a little of Plato (in translation, unhappily)," but confessed
to another, "Schiller's Song of the Bell[...]I have always been content to take on trust; I have never read it in German"
(Letters 24, 234-5).
6. Margaret Simons and, more recently, Toril Moi, have done much to expose the shortcomings of H. M. Parshley's
1953 translation of The Second Sex, and also to encourage Knopf/Vintage to commission a new translation. Moi
argues that "the philosophical incompetence of the translation produces a text that is damaging to Beauvoir's
intellectual reputation in particular and to the reputation of feminist philosophy in general" (1007).
7. "The question of what one can expect from a translation is always interesting. The publisher's [Knopf/Vintage's]
argument seems to be that if we agree that all translations are subjective, then there is no reason to find fault with
Parshley's particular efforts. This amounts to saying that since no translation can ever be a perfect rendering of all the
nuances of the original (which is true enough), then all other criteria for quality are moot. Or, in other words, since the
ideal translation can't be had and all translations are subjective, it really does not matter whether we are given an
excellent or a deplorable subjective translation. Beauvoir would surely have called this a bad faith argument" (Moi
1029-30).
8. Michael Cronin adopts Régis Debray's distinction between communication and transmission, as well as his notion
of social vectors, to question the usefulness of these technological gains for the practice of translation: "Failure to
understand the importance of social vectors leads to the false dawns of cyberhype. In everything from education to
translation, a physical transfer of information is confused with a social transfer of knowledge. It is the social transfer
which causes communication to become transmission and therefore to be enduring in its effects" (20).
9. See Guillory; Eagleton; Graff and Warner; Court; Baldick; Graff; Williams.
[Reference]
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[Author Affiliation]
Emily O. Wittman is assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama, and Katrina Windon is a senior
majoring in English and Spanish there. They gratefully acknowledge that research for this article was supported by
their university's Research Grants Committee.
[Appendix]
(ProQuest: Appendix omitted.)
Indexing (document details)
Author(s):
Author Affiliation:
Document types:
Document features:
Publication title:
Emily O Wittman, Katrina Windon
Emily O. Wittman is assistant professor of English at the University
of Alabama, and Katrina Windon is a senior majoring in English and
Spanish there. They gratefully acknowledge that research for this
article was supported by their university's Research Grants
Committee.
Feature
Tables, References
College English. Urbana: May 2010. Vol. 72, Iss. 5; pg. 449, 21 pgs
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00100994
ProQuest document ID:2016872951
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