Interview with the author
What prompted this book?
I wanted to find wellsprings of inspiration to translate, even if others read the text as theory or history or 'translator studies'. Some kind of unity-in-difference, and some kind of fellowship or sympathetic union; maybe, too, a sense I owe it to them as a translator myself. There is something communal, too, about having them together, as if they could be conjured more forcefully with the energy of the others, and in some cases they finish each other's thoughts. Each had a quest of sorts in life; I feel reverence for the unreasonably devoted.
The best of translators take translation seriously--that's everyone in the book; the very best take translation humorously--that's the earnest jesters: the translators who take their play seriously. I flatter myself to think the subjects here, for the most part, would like that their translation work is remembered.
In short, I wanted to see what I could see as far as whether there was a path to getting better as a translator (me, and others too if they want to come along); the second thing is I had begun thinking about the translator's immortality and monumentality as residing not in another, their allegiances, but perhaps in themselves, in their own words. I wrote about it in TTR (“'It is you who must be translated': Translational Immortality and Mark Strand’s The Monument," TTR, Volume 35, Number 1, 1er semestre 2022, p. 121–146, https://doi.org/10.7202/1093023ar), starting from Strand's challenge, 'How would you like to be translated 500 years from now?' These are immortality fantasies. But here the subjects are at work, not in a work. Their voices are theirs. People are most interesting, most themselves, in meaningful work, more than at leisure; we can see their cares.
To understand why we have a longing to live on, read Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. It's not a question of fame, but survival. To use Becker's language, translation I think is one form of a heroic, "defiant creation of meaning" separating us from what we might call the non-translating animals (I don't know which ones those are, but I will create that category; maybe we're all translators). Another reason I wrote the book was to practice a watchful meditation on a subject; a listening tour. I don't know that much aesthetic biography has been written about translators, so professionally that crossed my mind also.
So, you wrote the book for your own education and edification, in a way?
In a way. I was missing the personal part of translation theory and theorists. You don't even know they're invisible because you can't see them, the invisibly invisible.
Are these the original writers you had in mind for the work?
No, I wanted to start in the nineteenth century, but it wasn't feasible. I began to prefer the idea of those translators who have visible legacies and were writing on the cusp of the disciplinary boom.
Are they all literary translators?
Yes, though Barbara Johnson translated mostly philosophy.
What were some of the barriers in writing the book?
Occasionally, one thinks one is trespassing horribly on the peace of the dead. Who would speak for them? But I know my own mind, and the motives here are to pay homage; these are my people.
Logistically, there were 'scuba expeditions' as I think about them, into the archives, although the project itself is more formally probably a work of translation archeology, to use Pym's term, or translation historiography. We tend to think of memory, I discovered, as things that fade, but memory is actually a thing that disintegrates. It's less a dimming than a dispersing, and the living don't make it brighter but more coherent. An intellectual biography is a translation from phenomena into words. But maybe first it's a translation into the patterns that make our subjects' broad outlines. One has to find the hidden patterns first. But the barriers soon lifted with the exhilarations of discovery.
Piecing together can be done, though I labored under the duress of thinking at times that biographicity is an imposition, and we are each made of chaos and that tidying and paragraphing are no help. Linear time, in the end, is not all that useful for mapping someone's ideas; people really are more about the insistence of certain constants, or strange loops. Lives have motifs more than individual moments. And in the end, only certain parts of ourselves survive, crowding out the rest, or if you like, musically, they are resonating loudest.
I suppose, too, the original idea for the book was a definitional impediment. The subtitle at first was Translators and their Translation Philosophies. A reviewer was adamant that these were not philosophies; I suppose there are glimpses of philosophies, but what are they, if not? I threw myself on the mercy of the readers in the end, and said the book would have to speak for itself.
Did you understand everything each subject wrote about translation?
Just as when one translates, yes, to the extent I was able. You understand when you read, but you really understand when you write. One might say I wrote in order to understand the subjects. I was quite new to some, and one or two were no more than their names to me at the start. The 'tell' is if I quoted quite a bit; that means I was trying to assimilate, to not misrepresent; in fairness to myself, mostly I quoted where their expression was unimprovable or sui generis.
The hardest part was to show development of each subject's thought. What if it didn't 'develop'? Time telescopes in many cases, as I suggested, although I did try to place different periods of theorization in relation; Nabokov is the locus classicus of a radical change--in fact, older Nabokov the translator would have taken young Nabokov the translator out to the woodshed.
Why these translators?
These translators were chosen because of their self-reflection. Their ideas on translation are worth foregrounding and preserving, I felt. This isn't a canon, but a cross-section of those working at the time, a self-selecting sample in that they were deliberate practitioners. Ecumenical, it's true, and not all academics by any means. I am throwing down some kind of challenge in having 'amateur' translators featured here; read the Ursula K. Le Guin chapter and you will come away with new respect for them.
What is the most important revelation or memorable takeaway for each translator, do you think? Or rather, what word or phrase comes to mind when you think of each?
William Carlos Williams' American idiom; Vladimir Nabokov's gatekeeping; Langston Hughes' 'solidarity translation'; Barbara Wright's pioneering; Christopher Middleton's transrational alchemy of the word; Robert Bly's xenophilia; Burton Raffel's intensity; Ursula K. Le Guin's wryness; David Tod Roy's dedication; Clayton Eshleman's heroics; Anthea Bell's playfulness; John Felstiner's humanity; Seamus Heaney's 'through-other'; Dennis Tedlock's total translation; Barbara Godard's 'womanhandling'; Carol Maier's embodied translation; Barbara Johnson's 'faithful bigamy'; James S. Holmes' legacy; Ted Hughes' 'higher literalism'; and Robert Lowell's subversive 'imitations'.
Do you think you captured the essential humanity of each subject?
No, not for lack of trying, though. The reader will have many glimpses, and I deliberately approached each with the greatest of respect. I feel a kind of esprit de corps when I see the whole, the fellow-feeling you feel when you've gone through something together; I don't know whether they have put me through something or I, them.
Do you agree with the positions held by these translators?
Naturally, no, not all of them. I let slip small editorial asides in places (e.g. I recall one where an atheoretical translator was describing his independence of Translation Studies, and I may have suggested how the field's conceptual armature could have helped articulate a thought or two; I called another a 'showman', my concession to his somewhat self-promotional tendencies). It would never occur to me to declare myself free of theory, or free of anything that could give me the slightest chance of improving the work; the practitioners who eschew theory pretend they are more 'real' or grounded or genuine by so doing, or they have the contagion of that 'autodidactic' natural genius thing. There is a machismo posturing involved, as it happens. One or two names in the book were too reticent or self-sacrificing; a few others, on the other side of the continuum, could have held their egos in check. But the story told by the whole is not 'how to be a translator' but 'how these translators were translators'. Part of my point is particularity. I came away with great admiration for some in the end; others, a bit of pity.
What are the similarities and differences between them?
The readers are likely to have a sense of the translators not as wordsmiths alone but as advocates, publishers, editors, teachers, researchers, philosophers, creative artists, and adherents to different faiths and schools of thought. People. It's important for visibility that translators be seen not only as translators, I think. Translation, understood aright, should be considered in the constellation of activities, vocations and avocations, that constitute a translator's life, or at least their mental life. A great many are accidental translators, and accidental theorists. If translators can't celebrate the happy accident, who can?
Their differences lie not so much in the accidentality or deliberateness of their careers, however, but in what role they saw for translation: some, for changemaking and political solidarity; others, for creative engagement with difference and overcoming insularity. None saw translation as mere mimesis. It is, in fact, startling to think that many people imagine translation to be like changing a gas to a solid to a liquid and back, the particles all coming to heel like tamed bears at a circus. Or like money, something fungible, or substitutable. Have they never struggled for the 'right' word, or been misunderstood? Languages are not a pure science. There is rather a 'family resemblance' between them, Wittgenstein's idea, I think. All the translators, in their way, knew translation to be an art if it's treated like one.
What does the whole of the work point to as far as these translators' influence on the field?
I'll invite the reader to read the afterword, where I lay out some general tendencies these authors foreran. Likely there are more. There are two good reasons to read precursors, in short: because they are like us, and because they are not like us.
Any plans to do a version about translators who worked into other languages?
Not on my part. However, I am finishing a study of Octavio Paz' work, called "Analogy, Transmutation, Resurrection: Octavio Paz' Translation Practice."
You don't evaluate the quality of the respective translators' work. Why is that?
I'm not interested in assessing their work because my view is metatranslational, focusing on how they approached it. Their translation works' accordance with their philosophies is a valid question, but beyond what I aim for here.
What were you seeking with this book?
I set the goal for myself of trying to know the person through their work, and that means being attentive to their values. I particularly was attuned to translation theories that double as ways of being in the world. For instance, did the translator value translation because it let them closer into knowing others, bridging vast expanses, as an epistemology (making familiar what is strange, while keeping it strange)? I wanted to find out the mechanics of their drives, and how they were at home with others, the phrase I use to describe the way a translator does not repel otherness, nor assimilate it to himself or herself, but holds it in a kind of circuit, the unhomely and the homely embraced under one roof.
At bottom I felt a kind of loss before I started--these were people whose individuality had been blurred by death like a poor translation; someone should leave some kind of roadside memorial just to say they passed this way. I was impertinent enough for the challenge, and reverent enough for its execution.
My narratives of their thinking are of course not the only way of remembering the respective subjects. I saw, and see, in them what I need, maybe, and thus subjectivity is inevitable. But I saw in them the shapes of things to come in our field today.
Will you add more translators to future editions?
That will be up to Routledge. You have to die, though; I won't accept self-nominations.
Do you have future authors in mind?
A deadpool? That would be morbid. I hereby hope all living translators live forever, retaining their copyrights.
Would you be happy if your subjects' surviving family recognized your efforts?
I will be happy if they are not angry with me, happier if they are happy, and happiest if they are somehow moved, in whatever measure. Firstly to the bookstore to grab a copy.
