The Translator as Hero in Postmodern Fiction

The Translator as Hero in Postmodern FictionAuthor(s): Jon ThiemSource: Translation and Literature, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1995), pp. 207-218Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40339710 .

Accessed: 24/09/2013 11:52

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Translationand Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 200.52.254.249 on Tue, 24 Sep 2013 11:52:44 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=eup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40339710?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


The Translator as Hero in Postmodern Fiction

Jon Thiem

'Conan the Translator' does have a nice ring to it. - Dennis Kratz, alt a Newsletter

The idea that the translator is a heroic figure has not yet come of age, either in literature or in the world at large. The phrase 'Conan the Translator' does have a wonderful resonance, but literature offers few instances of translators acting out epic roles. Why should the idea of the translator as hero be so unexpected, so diverting? Even as the protagonist of a postmodern novel, the translator will inevitably acquire a certain aura, will seem larger than life, will project something, however tenuous, of the heroic. Moreover, in the modern world itself we have encountered the translator as tragic hero. He is Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, stabbed to death in 1991. He is Ettore Capriolo, translator of The Satanic Verses, stabbed, but not fatally, in the same month in Italy. But the fact remains that translation and heroic activity seem antithetical. The hero is easily recognized as the one who exudes an over-abundance of self. Our virtue as translators, on the other hand, apparently depends on a deficiency of self, on a high degree of 'negative capability'. Precisely our modesty, our willingness to play second fiddle, to meld into the identity of a primary creator, is often viewed as a precondition of successful translation. Are we not required, as translators, to be humble, selfless to the degree that we can take on the sensibility, style, and world view of the writer? Does not our lack of prestige and social status as translators mirror, alas, this negative capability? We are poorly paid and often anonymous, our names left off dust jackets and title pages, omitted from bibliographies and book reviews. When not wholly invisible, we appear as marginal figures indeed.

Yet there are ancient precedents for an alternative view in which translation is conceived as an epic endeavour and the translator as heroic. In the legend of the Septuagint, the Hellenistic world gives us the prototype of the translator as cultural hero. The seventy translators of the Hebrew scriptures labour in isolation, each in his cell, in Alexandria,

207



2o8 The Translator as Hero

where their sponsor King Ptolemy Philadelphia eagerly awaits the Greek version, which will give him access to the wisdom of the Hebrews. Miraculously, all seventy versions turn out identical, a kind of super- natural fidelity that induces the Church to declare the Septuagint translation divinely inspired, on a par with the Hebrew original. Somewhat less mythical, on the other hand, is Nietzsche's nineteenth-century account of the Roman appropriation of Greek culture by means of translation: this translatio was heroic to the degree that it lacked fidelity. The Roman poets, Nietzsche says, transformed 'with power and naivete' all that was 'good and noble in the Greeks'. Nietzsche's Roman poet-translators - Horace and Propertius, for example - turned Alcaeus, Callimachus, and other Greek poets into Latin, bothering little with Greek local names or indigenous ideas and customs, putting in their place contemporary Roman equivalents. Nietzsche, who compares this procedure to Roman conquest, finds something heroic in it: 'indeed one conquered in those days, when translating; . . . the name of the original poet was rubbed out and replaced by one's own - there was no sense of thieving in this, but rather the best conscience of the imperium RomanunC (translation by Andre Lefevere in his Translating Literature (Assen, 1977), p. 96).

These two instances seem contradictory. The seventy Hebrews transform Hellenistic culture through their fidelity to the original Hebrew text, whereas the Latin poets invent Roman culture by betraying, violating, and Romanizing Greek texts. Yet these examples of heroic translation share several ideas. First, the transmission of texts between distant cultures is a monumental task with profound consequences. Second, though translations may be secondary creations, they can attain an authority equal to, or greater than, the originals. Finally, these heroic translations benefited Hellenistic Alexandria and ancient Rome, both successor- or epigone-civilizations for whom translation was at once a symptom of and a panacea for cultural belatedness.

The recurrence of these ideas in the modern age contributes to the revaluation of translation and the translator, for ours is also a period marked by extensive cultural fluidity and exchange; by an obsessive interest in the interplay of primary and secondary creation; and by a strong sense of cultural belatedness. For postmodern writers, the translator is perhaps less a heroic than a representative figure. I have found six postwar novels and several stories which feature translators, usually as protagonists. Given the shortage of translators in earlier twentieth- century fiction,1 the fact that they appear at all in postmodern fiction is surprising, and calls for an explanation.

Two major developments help account for the debut of the translator as literary character and representative figure in the postwar period. The



Jon Thiem 209

first is the internationalization of literature, which grows with modernism and intensifies in the decades after the Second World War. The most striking factor in the internationalization of writing has been political: legions of writers have been driven from their lands by war, revolution, and racism; by Fascism, Communism, National Socialism, and a multi- tude of backwater dictatorships. Throughout our century the extensive migrations of writers and their texts across language boundaries has drawn attention to the necessity and difficulty of literary translation. Nor has the expatriation of writers diminished in the postwar period. To survive as writers, expatriates must either change languages, engage in self-translation, or, as is most often the case, rely on translators to give their work a new voice. Other political events that have highlighted the key role of translation in the postwar world are the gradual unification of the European Common Market countries, on the one hand, and the breaking up of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union into a group of states exhibiting an intense ethnic and linguistic nationalism.

The self-consciously international character of both modernism and postmodernism has also contributed to the imperative of translation. In the former, translation has not only been an important precondition for moving texts across boundaries; it has also been a significant method for creating new literary works. High modernists - Joyce, Eliot, and Pound come to mind - translated, and incorporated into their own works, passages from writing in other languages. They did this with such creative vigour that one may justifiably refer to their translation as a form of conquest. Postmodern writers have used translation in similar ways. Moreover, since the 1960s the intrusion of some postmodern works into the mass market has created the phenomenon of the postmodern international best-seller. Hence the success that writers like A. S. Byatt, Eco, Kundera, Rushdie, Fowles, and Marquez have had with non-professional readers. Thus, translators have had their hands full satisfying eager readers who speak a variety of different tongues. Since translators have become key players in the literary arena, it is not surprising that many writers have published literary translations themselves; one thinks of Borges, Nabokov, Handke, Cortazar, Francesca Duranti, and D. M. Thomas.

The second major development that has made the translator such a representative personage is the spread of the feeling that as postmoderns we are epigones. Like the epigone, the translator is a kind of latecomer in the processes of intertextual transformation. The translator's secondary position with respect to the primary text makes him or her a personifica- tion of belatedness, and translation itself a model for all forms of belated cultural endeavour. Of course, the very term 'postmodern' denotes posteriority. Like translators, belated artists must come to terms with



2io The Translator as Hero

artistic achievements not of their own making. Harold Bloom has extensively argued that the encounter with past achievements is usually accompanied by a sense of inadequacy, if not creative impotence; the presence and authority of the past, of all that has been already said, becomes a burden. This is what it means to be an epigone: it is to feel that we live in the shadow of giants, that everything worth saying has already been said, that the possibilities of originality, of primary creation, have seriously diminished. The identity crisis of the postmodern artist, and of the artist's alter ego, the translator, arises out of the modern axiom that one's artistic identity depends on primary creations.

The challenge for the postmodern artist has been to construct an adequate identity, either by finding a unique voice in primary creation, or by accepting epigone status and taking on the tasks of secondary creation. One notorious response to this challenge has been to write fiction about the problem of writing fiction in a period of cultural belatedness. Indeed, fictions about translators usually fall into this category: the theme of translation offers a somewhat distanced paradigm for the perils and opportunities of belated endeavour, for the agonistic interplay of primary and secondary creation. Theoretical writing on translation in recent years has been a significant stimulus in providing solutions to the problem of cultural belatedness. New ideas about the status of the epigone and the authority of secondary creations have emerged from these discussions. Two developments in translation theory help account for the rise of the translator as representative figure, as alter ego of the postmodern writer: a new awareness of the textual paradoxes emerging from the phenomenon of self-translation, and the apologia for translation in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges.

A remarkable number of postwar writers have practised self-translation, that is, the translation of their own work into another language, either independently or in collaboration with another translator. Counted among the self-translators are the founding fathers of literary postmodernism: Borges, Beckett, and Nabokov. Others include Raymond Federman, Isak Dinesen, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Manuel Puig, and Joseph Brodsky. Among critics, there is widespread agreement that self-translation is a special case of translation. Writers, for example, who translate texts they have authored can with relative impunity revise, supplement, abridge, or misread their own previous texts. An ordinary translator (not an Ezra Pound, mind you) who took such liberties would be raked over the coals for mistranslating the authoritative text. The self-translator, however, is still protected by the tenacious idea of authorial intentionality. Since the translator is also the author, almost anything goes: the secondary creation may be fashioned as if it were a primary one. Here it is interesting to note



Jon Thiem 211

that in spite of New Critical and poststructuralist demolitions of authorial intentionality and even of the concept of the author, these so-called illusions persist. Translators invariably attempt to get at the author's intention and original meaning. Hence self-translators are given great licence, for critics feel that as authors, self-translators have privileged access to their own intentions, usually regarded as authoritative. Among students of self-translation, Lori Chamberlain seems to be in the minor- ity in arguing that we should not take the author's authority as a translator of his own work too seriously.2 She claims that we cannot really assume that Beckett has 'perfect access to his intentions, as if everything he did in the original was both deliberate and conscious'. Even so, self- translations continue to have great authority, and this fact has had an impact on how we think about secondary creation and the relationship of author and epigone.

When, as in the case of Beckett, Borges, or Nabokov, the writer makes a second version of his or her work through a translation, the question is raised as to which text is more authoritative, especially when the translation contains changes and i improvements'. What happens to the idea of belatedness, of derivativeness, in this situation? As Brian Fitch argues in an essay in the same volume as Chamberlain's, critics and readers should not ignore either version; yet knowing both presents insoluble problems concerning the text. Does the translation stand in relation to the original as a correction, or duplicate, or simulacrum, or substitute, or continuation, or completion? Should we consider the translation as the author's iast word', as ultimately more significant because it comes later? Or, follow- ing Fitch, should we refer to one or more trans-textual fictive universes, sources of both original and second version (Beckett Translating, pp. 27-8)? For our purposes, Fitch's conclusion concerning the relation between priority and secondariness is most interesting. He maintains that

the classic situation of the translation's relationship to its original has been turned upside down. What better proof of this ... than the fact that at times, it is the first version that furnishes an interpretation of the second, rather than vice versa. This means the dependence of the translation upon the original has been replaced by interdependence.

(p. 32)

For Chamberlain as well, the case of Beckett shows that the distinction that writing is primary and translation secondary no longer holds.

In self-translation an author becomes his own epigone, but the secondary or derivative text is no longer seen as inferior to the original.



212 The Translator as Hero

Rather, the roles are often reversed, and the epigone text seems to be prior to the original, or more faithful than the original to some trans-text or Ursprache or f/r-idiolect. When Isak Dinesen wanted her Seven Gothic Tales to appear in Danish, she translated them herself, for she wanted them to appear as 'an original Danish book' and not as a translation. Comparing both versions, Elias Bredsdorff concluded that the original sometimes seems 'more like a translation and the translation like an original text'. Here again we meet with the Borgesian paradox of the epigone text being superior to the original. In contrast to Dinesen, Nabokov, according to his biographer Brian Boyd, commissioned 'basic translations' of his Russian works into English, so that he himself would not be tempted to improve on the originals and thereby subvert their authority.

The most notorious attempt to use translation as a means of legitimating the epigone position in textual production is found in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. His essays and scattered observations on translation should be considered the postmodern prolegomenon to the subject. But Borges was not only a theorist. Besides being a self- translator into English, he also translated major modernist works by Kafka, Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf into Spanish. His two major essays on translation are 'Las versiones homericas' (1932), collected in Discusion (Buenos Aires, 1964), and 'The Translators of the 1,001 Nights' (1935). Other discussions of translation occur in the 'The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald', 'The Mirror of the Enigmas', and 'About William Beckford's Vathek\ the last collected in Other Inquisitions, translated by Ruth Simms (Austin, 1975).

Borges's tendency to privilege the translation in any contest with the original text finds succinct expression in his famous aphorisms on the subject, as in 'the original is unfaithful to the translation' ('About William Beckford's Vathek?), or in his saying in The Aleph and Other Stories that the Spanish original of Don Quixote reads like a 'bad translation' compared to the English version, or in the phrase 'the superstition that translations are inferior' ('Las versiones homericas'; my translations). In 'Las versiones homericas' Borges challenges the idea that the original is superior to the translation by arguing that the original is not recover- able, for we are unable to differentiate what belongs to Homer from what belongs to the Greek language. Our notion that there is an 'original text' comes from the habit of rereading Homer until we convince ourselves a text is there. What there is of Homer, however, is like a 'complex equation that registers the precise relations between unknown quantities' (my translation). If that is so, we will find it impossible to determine whether any translation is superior to another, or even if the 'original' is



Jon Thiem 213

superior to the translation. In fact, the original hardly has an existence independent of the numerous translations. Or, rather, the original is the sum of all the translations.

The real subject of 'The Translators of the 1,001 Nights' is Sir Richard Burton, whom Borges portrays as a hero, less because of Burton's swashbuckling adventures than because of his monumental translation. Comparing Burton to other translators, Borges tries to show how the former drew on a wide range of English literary styles in order to enrich the 'stylistic poverty' of the original. Burton's translation recognizes, exploits, and to some extent epitomizes the totality of English writing that came before it. He has created, in short, a work of British literature. Burton is a primary creator, not just an interpreter, and the original work seems inferior to the translation.

Borges's essays and the new studies of self-translation have helped to deconstruct the traditional dichotomy of writing and translation, of primary and secondary creation. Most fascinating for postmoderns, obsessed as they are with originality and belatedness, is the possibility of relegating original works to a secondary position. This piquant notion is at the heart of two of the fictional narratives I discuss below.

* * *

Novels and stories which are the narrative expressions of the new interest in translation may for convenience be called 'translator fictions'. In this second half of my discussion, I would like to examine the central motifs of seven translator fictions, six novels and one story, all from the postwar period.

One motif found pervasively in them is that of translation as betrayal. It is of course a commonplace that the traduttore is also a traditore. The belated position of the translator is a powerful one: translators often have both literally and figuratively the last word. Insofar as the late or ultimate versions of translators inevitably transform the primary texts, it is easy enough to regard transformation as deformation, profanation, betrayal. Thus, even the best translations involve betrayal. These translator fictions, however, are less concerned with the minimal unavoidable distortions involved in any translation than with the translator- protagonist's deliberate abuse of his privileged belated position for personal or ideological ends. A second common motif is the identity crisis of the translator, the sense that translation requires or results in a loss of self. A final motif is the indefiniteness of the boundary between authorship and translation, between primary and secondary creation, with the concomitant conflicts and confusions.




Translator characters in fiction often abuse their position and involve themselves in all kinds of betrayal - political, emotional, artistic. Though they exercise a good deal of power, translators are paid little. The translator's inability to withstand the temptation to prostitute himself for money or fame is often the main impetus driving the plot of a translator fiction. In Richard Lourie's postmodern spy thriller First Loyalty (New York, 1985), David Aronow, a translator of Russian emigre literature, translates the letters of a Soviet scientist for a police investigation, but he purposely mistranslates one letter to conceal the existence of a new drug whose formula he wants for himself, partly to earn big money. In Ward Just's The Translator (Boston, 1991), Sydney Van Damm, who special- izes in contemporary German literature, needs money. So he becomes the translator for a black market operation selling contraband Warsaw Pact weapons in a disintegrating German Democratic Republic. Both translator-protagonists betray not only their countries but also their own ethical standards. Similarly, the Italian translator of German and Austrian literature in Francesca Duranti's The House on Moon Lake (translated by Sartarelli, New York, 1986) creates fictitious incidents in his biography of Fritz Oberhofer, of whom he is the translator of record. His motive is to gain money and fame by catering to the public's desire for romantic gossip. And Jake Donaghue, an impoverished translator of French novels in Iris Murdoch's Under the Net (London, 1954), betrays a philosopher friend by transcribing their talks, without the latter's permission, and 'translating' them into the archaic idiom of Renaissance dialogue. He also makes a living by translating a second-rate French novelist, but he redeems himself in the end by refusing the lucrative offer of turning the latter's novels into Hollywood movie scripts.

Most of our translator-heroes lack a strong sense of personal identity, and this deficiency seems to be both a precondition and a product of their engaging in translations. It may be an occupational hazard of the profession. Murdoch's Donoghue is, in the words of one critic, an existentialist hero in search of a self. His lack of an individual voice is evident. He likes to translate because it is similar to 'opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge' (p. 22). As with Thomas Bernhard's ̂Stimmenimitator\ Donoghue can reproduce any voice but his own. Fabrizio Garrone in Duranti's novel thinks of himself as a non- entity (p. 24). His inadequate sense of self prevents him from responding to the love of his mistress. Like many translators he identifies so strongly with his author that the latter, though dead, begins to usurp Garrone's being. In a magical realist turn Garrone becomes Fritz Oberhofer, re- enacting his life and death, one of the more extreme results of negative capability. Ward Just's translator also lacks a firm sense of personal



Jon Thiem 215

identity, and he wonders if he has a being outside that of the German author whose oeuvre he is translating (p. 96). The Keatsian epigraph to Lourie's First Loyalty reiterates this motif: 'A poet ... has no identity - he is continually ... filling some other body.' The novel begins with the translator-poet in the throes of a mid-life identity crisis: he has left his wife and child and has given up on an original work of his own. Like Garrone, Aronow also cannot fully return the love of his mistress. Finally, the character of Ermes Marana, the translator in Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, translated by William Weaver (New York, 1 981), is so multiform and mysterious as to suggest the utter absence of a personal identity.

The final motif to consider in translator fictions is the indefiniteness of the boundary between authorship and translation, between primary and secondary creation. Conventionally seen, translation is a secondary process, the presentation of a second version, the re-presentation of an original or primary creation. One of the principal sources of conflict in translator fictions is the almost unavoidable fluidity of the boundary between primary and secondary creator. Conflict usually arises when the translator would take on, or move back to, the prior, more creative position of the author. Many translator characters try to engage in primary creation, but, as with the magic of sorcerers' apprentices, the results are usually unforeseen and calamitous. It is interesting to note here that most of the translator fictions at hand take seriously the distinction between primary and secondary creation. Except in Alain Nadaud's story and Calvino's novel, the poststructuralist tendency to erase the distinction is not strong. Yet these fictions do make the line between derivativeness and originality a fine one.

To help establish their identity or resolve their financial problems, translator-heroes often become authors, usually with ambiguous, if not positively unhappy, results. As we have seen, Garrone in Duranti's novel becomes a primary creator when he invents a plot to fill in the gaps in Oberhofer's life. The biographer-translator becomes a novelist himself. But Garrone unleashes a cycle of primary creation he cannot control: the world he invents turns into reality, and he becomes both Oberhofer, the primary creator, and a prisoner in this invented world. Murdoch's novel, on the other hand, seems at first to deal with the translator-author contest in more conventional terms. Under the Net is a Kunstlerroman insofar as it tells the story of Donaghue's emergence from the chrysalis of translation into the bright world of authorship, of true self-discovery. Presumably, Under the Net is Donaghue's first novel, which contains the story of its own begetting. Yet Murdoch calls this happy development into question by making the last scene of the novel a free translation of a




section of Sartre's Nausea.3 This leads the (learned) reader to ask: has Donaghue really escaped translation? Is the epigone's attempt to transcend secondary creation illusory, futile?

In Alain Nadaud's story 'Interview with Samuel Astonguet',4 and in Calvino's novel, the postmodern interplay of translation and authorship achieves its paradoxical extreme. Nadaud's Borgesian 'story' (translated and perhaps also written by Breon Mitchell) takes the form of an interview with M. Astonguet, the French translator of an Indian author, Apasari Satchinadam. The real nature of the relationship between translation and original text remains undefinable throughout the story. Satchinadam may not even exist, and critics claim his stories were actually written by Astonguet, himself a sometime author, who insists he is only the translator. Some regard the translations as superior to the original stories in Marathi, a Borgesian judgement that reverses the usual relationship of authority between translations and original text. The superiority of the translations may be due to the fact that Astonguet mistranslated the stories. Yet reading the originals so impressed Astonguet that he developed writer's block and stopped composing original works of his own. When rumours emerge that Astonguet wrote the 'translated' stories, he does little to dispel them. In a final usurpation, Astonguet confesses that he murdered the Indian author, perhaps because Satchinadam with- held from him the real meaning of the stories. In an epilogue to the interview we learn that Astonguet was recently killed in an accident. The conflicts in Nadaud's story reflect the seemingly irresolvable tensions between primary and secondary creator. The indeterminacies, on the other hand, suggest that the two processes of creation, if not indistin- guishable, are inextricably bound up with each other.

Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1981) presents another complex Borgesian situation in which a translator seems to usurp the position of primary creator. Where Astonguet claimed to have literally murdered his author, the ubiquitous but elusive translator Ermes Marana here heads up a world-wide conspiracy to bring about the death of the author, at least in the figurative, poststructuralist sense of the phrase. Here is an example of one of Marana's shenanigans. He sends a translation 'from the Cimbrian' to a publisher. When the printer discovers some irregularities in the text, Marana confesses he knows no Cimbrian. He says the text was really translated instead from a novel in Polish. It turns out, however, that Marana in fact translated the text from the French of a Belgian novelist (pp. 99-100). Marana purposely produced this intertextual chaos. Backed up by a stable of computers 'programmed as they are to develop all the elements of a text with perfect fidelity to the stylistic and conceptual models of the author' (p. 118), Marana floods the



Jon Thiem 217

world with apocryphal texts and pseudo-translations. Some of his front organizations are the Organization for Apocryphal Power (OAP) and the Organization for the Electronic Production of Homogenized Literary Works (OEPHLW). Even If on a Winter's Night - itself a collection of fragments of other novels or pastiches of other novels that break off before any resolution - seems to be Marana's invention. The purpose behind these machinations is to hasten the demise of the author. For Marana the author is a fiction (p. 180). He asks what it will matter who the author is 3,000 years from now (p. 101). In Marana's ideal world, then, individual authorship has been replaced by an uncontrolled intertextuality produced by computers and pastiche specialists. The latter resemble translators in their willingness to sacrifice their own inclinations to authorship in the interests of conveying a prior discourse, or a secondary version of one. With the proliferation of pseudo-translations and pastiches, the works of real authors will become difficult to find among the fakes. As a result, primary creation will become unrecognizable and disappear. The world will foster and acknowledge only secondary creators; translators will no longer need authors. In the final analysis, Marana's art of pseudo-translation is clearly a reductio ad absurdum of postmodern poetics, and perhaps Cal vino's own practice as well.

In striking contrast to the translators in the fictions considered so far is the figure of the translator in Peter Handke's novel The Afternoon of a Writer, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York, 1989). It is appropriate to conclude with Handke, for he dispenses completely with the motifs that have been integral to all the other translator fictions. Handke's translator does not practise betrayal, does not seem to suffer from a lack of identity, and does not try to usurp the position of the author. He is, in fact, a model of the happy epigone.

The novel's protagonist is a writer who has lost his capacity to speak as one. In an episode towards the end of the novel, the writer meets with his translator, who has come from abroad to check the meanings of some words in one of the writer's texts. The reader infers that both the writer and Handke, who is also an occasional translator, find the epigonic position of the translator an enviable one. The key to the writer's envy of the translator lies in the fact that the writer, a primary creator, suffers from a loss of creativity. His life as a writer is pervaded by angst and confusion. The unnamed translator explains to the writer, also unnamed, how he (the translator) had started out as a writer but had become a translator. For him, primary creation had been the translation or transcription of some magical Ur-text within his 'innermost being' (P- 75)> DUt witn time, with the systematic recording of it, the Ur-text became unreliable and fragmentary. The translator experienced, in short,




a loss of creativity similar to the writer's. He found, however, that he could become productive and happy through translating, always certain of having a reliable text. Hence his resolution never to return to primary creativity. He explains that as a translator he remains true to himself, and that translation brings him 'deep peace' (p. 77), for he is freed of the burdens of individual expression. Translation allows him to be 'refresh- ingly superficial'. By revealing the wounds of others, he conceals his own (p. 77). When he first meets the writer he states a riddling metaphor: 'Is it not true that the abundance of fruit at the edge of the forest lures us into the middle, where there is nothing?' (p. 74). Here is an image of centre and margin where the marginal position, that of the secondary creator, seems more productive and less frightening than the central position of the writer.

Handke may be saying that one viable way to come to terms with our belatedness, and the creative agonies that result, is to embrace the secondary position.5 The novel ends with a postscript from Goethe: 'everything is there and I am nothing'. For the writer this condition means torment; for the translator, useful employment.

Colorado State University

Notes

1. One example of the modernist translator-hero is Lyutov in Isaac Babel's story 'Guy de Maupassant', written in the 1920s. The story discusses in passing the nature of style in translation and even offers fragments of a translation of a Maupassant story, which the protagonist mistranslates and adapts for purposes of seduction. Motifs in the story that anticipate postmodern treatments are translation as wilful betrayal and the usurpation of the translator's identity by that of the author.

2. Lori Chamberlain, "The Same Old Stories": Beckett's Poetics of Translation', in Beckett Translating / Translating Beckett, edited by A. W. Friedman et al. (University Park, 1987). The quotation comes from p. 20.

3. On these two points see Steven Kellman, 'Under the Net: The Self-Begetting Novel', in Iris Murdoch, edited by Harold Bloom (New York, 1986), pp. 95, 100.

4. Published in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 43 (New York, 198 1). 5. When the translator leaves, the writer secretly follows him through the

streets. The writer thus voluntarily and unbeknown to the translator assumes the secondary position. In a striking and tender image, the writer compares the basket in which the translator carries his translated manuscript to the basket that bore Moses down the Nile to Pharaoh's daughter (p. 78).



The Translator as Hero in Postmodern Fiction

Documents

Transcript of The Translator as Hero in Postmodern Fiction