Translation and the Problem of Sway (Benjamins Translation Library, 92)

Translation and the Problem of Sway

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General Editor

Associate Editor

Honorary Editor

Yves Gambier

Miriam Shlesinger

Gideon Toury

Rosemary Arrojo

Zuzana Jettmarová

Sherry Simon

Michael Cronin

Alet Kruger

Şehnaz Tahir Gürçaglar

Dirk Delabastita

John Milton

Maria Tymoczko

Daniel Gile

Franz Pöchhacker

University of Turku

Bar-Ilan University Israel

Tel Aviv University

Advisory Board Binghamton University Dublin City University FUNDP (University of Namur) Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne Nouvelle

Amparo Hurtado Albir

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Charles University of Prague UNISA, South Africa University of São Paulo University of Vienna

Concordia University Bogaziçi University

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Lawrence Venuti

Anthony Pym

Temple University

Rosa Rabadán

University of Graz

Universitat Rovira i Virgili University of León

Volume 92 Translation and the Problem of Sway by Douglas Robinson

Michaela Wolf

Translation and the Problem of Sway Douglas Robinson Lingnan University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdamâ•›/â•›Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robinson, Douglas, 1954Translation and the problem of sway / Douglas Robinson. p. cm. (Benjamins Translation Library, issn 0929-7316 ; v. 92) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Translating and interpreting--Methodology. I. Title. P306.2.R614â•…â•… 2011 418’.02--dc22 isbn 978 90 272 2440 8 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8682 6 (Eb)

2011007367

© 2011 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents Preface Acknowledgments chapter 1 Introduction: Translation and sway 1.1 The question of errorâ•… 2 1.2 The Brafmans on swayâ•… 7 1.3 Gideon Toury on translation normsâ•… 11 1.4 Venuti and Bakerâ•… 13 chapter 2 Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 2.1 Martindale on the translator’s free playâ•… 18 2.2 Venuti’s argumentâ•… 21 2.3 Rethinking the interpretantâ•… 27 2.4 The interpretant as an impulse reticulated through the somatic exchangeâ•… 32 2.5 Conclusionâ•… 38 chapter 3 The case of Alex. Matson 3.1 The backgroundâ•… 42 3.1.1 Seven Brothers â•… 42 3.1.2 The life and workâ•… 52 3.1.3 Translating Seven Brothers â•… 55 3.1.4 Being bilingualâ•… 61 3.1.5 New Critical focus on formâ•… 63 3.2 Matson’s translations â•… 68 3.2.1 From English to Finnishâ•… 68 3.2.1.1 Joyce’s Portraitâ•… 68 3.2.1.2 Faulkner’s Wild Palmsâ•… 72 3.2.1.3 Faulkner’s As I Lay Dyingâ•… 77

ix xiii

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

3.2.2 From Finnish to Englishâ•… 80 3.2.2.1 Translating Aino Kallasâ•… 80 3.2.2.2 Translating F. E. Sillanpääâ•… 82 3.2.2.2.1 Fallen Asleep While Youngâ•… 82 3.2.2.2.2 Meek Heritageâ•… 83

3.3 Matson’s interpretants â•… 85 3.3.1 Observing Matson translatingâ•… 85 3.3.2 The rhetorical interpretantâ•… 88 3.3.2.1 Bakhtin’s internal dialogismâ•… 90 3.3.2.2 Pathos, ēthos, and logosâ•… 92 3.3.2.2.1 The logical interpretantâ•… 95 3.3.2.2.2 The pathetic interpretantâ•… 96 3.3.2.2.3 The ethical interpretantâ•… 97 3.3.3 Analytical applicationsâ•… 98 3.3.3.1 Stiff narrative jointsâ•… 99 3.3.3.2 The interplay of “correctness” and “pleasure”â•… 100 3.3.3.3 Cultural belonging â•… 104 chapter 4 The spatiotemporal dynamic of foreignization 113 4.0 Introduction: The phenomenology and structuralism of foreignismâ•… 113 4.1 “Foreignism and the Phantom Limb”â•… 115 4.2 David Bohm on proprioceptionâ•… 117 4.3 Antonio Damasio on somatomimesisâ•… 120 4.4 The group proprioception of translationâ•… 121 4.4.1 The own and the alienâ•… 122 4.4.2 Estrangementâ•… 123 4.4.3 The group proprioception of foreignizing translationâ•… 127 chapter 5 Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 5.1 Venuti on translating Dostoevskyâ•… 131 5.2 Two Dostoevsky translationsâ•… 135 5.2.1 Dostoevsky’s “bad writing” â•… 135 5.2.2 Comparison of a single paragraphâ•… 142 5.2.3 Colloquialismâ•… 143 5.2.4 Polyphonic Dostoevskyâ•… 145 5.3 Theorizing translationâ•… 149 5.3.1 The axiological interpretantâ•… 150 5.3.2 The (meta)formal interpretantâ•… 157

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Table of contents 

chapter 6 Mona Baker on narratives 6.0 Introductionâ•… 161 6.1 Narrativity and interpretancyâ•… 163 6.2 The somatic exchangeâ•… 168 6.3 Rhetorical situationâ•… 173 6.3.1 Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigmâ•… 175 6.3.2 The warrantâ•… 178 6.3.3 Reticulatory resonanceâ•… 182 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

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189 195 213 223

Preface There are many ways to contribute to the intellectual development of a field. One can invent a whole new approach, an original theoretical or analytical model that revolutionizes the field – the kind of contribution that typically wins the scholar in question the highest possible accolades. One can adapt someone else’s theory or analytical model to the needs of the field – a contribution that is perhaps less highly respected than the invention of a radically new approach, but that is nevertheless extraordinarily valuable, as it too can revolutionize a field. This second type of contribution, I suggest, is the focus of my book, or rather, two instances of it are: Lawrence Venuti’s adaptation of Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of the interpretant (as well as, again, his adaptation of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s concept of foreignization) for the study of translations, and Mona Baker’s adaptation of narrative theory to the study of translating and interpreting. My book itself offers a third type of contribution, parasitical on the second: it seeks to test, challenge, critique, expand upon, rethink someone else’s proposed paradigm shift. According to Thomas Kuhn (1962/1970), if the first two contributions constitute “revolutionary science,” this third would be a form of “normal science”: it accepts the descriptive power of the other scholar’s paradigm-busting contribution, and seeks only to help that new paradigm account more fully and more complexly for the empirical data. Obviously this is a humbler task than either of the first two, on which it relies. (A fourth would be to anthologize samples of the first three contributions.) I also, however, bring to the study of translation in terms of interpretants and narrativity my own “new” and potentially revolutionary paradigm, new at least in Robinson (1991), when I first proposed it: the somatics of translation, or, roughly speaking, the ways in which the decisions made by translation commissioners, translators, and the critics and ordinary readers of translations are guided by shared evaluative affect. The reticulation of such affect through a group, or what I call the somatic exchange, is my model of all social regulation – the channel by which such things as the meaning of a word or phrase, the correctness or notquite-correctness of a linguistic structure or ideological formulation, and the appropriateness of a response are governed by the group. It is my claim in this book that Venuti’s model of the interpretant and Baker’s model of narrativity both tacitly depend, for their ability to guide translator (and other) behavior, on something

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

like my somatic paradigm – indeed, as I hope to show in Chapter 6, that Baker’s model of narrativity depends on the operation of a prenarrative interpretant that guides us in imposing narrative form on experience, and that at the core of that interpretant is the somatics of all human interaction. As my title suggests, too, I here for the first time introduce into the discussion the concept of sway, which I borrow from the book of that title by Ori and Rom Brafman (2008). The Brafmans tend to understand sway as a purely irrational force, typically emerging out of emotional response, tiredness or other sources of rational deficits, or group pressures; in Chapter 1 I track the problems with defining sway so narrowly and so negatively, suggesting that the norms and values we hold most dear, even the very notion of rational thought and rational behavior, are themselves the product of sway. My suggestion there is that the translation norms pioneeringly theorized by Gideon Toury (1980) are merely the “positive” version of translational sway, of which the translator errors that have long been a staple of translation criticism, as well as the translator “bias” that is arguably the focus on Venuti’s work on interpretants and Baker’s work on narrativity, are thus the flip or “dark” side. In subsuming translation norms, errors, and biases under the rubric of “sway,” I am tacitly urging a moving past the up/down, light/dark, good/bad binaries that have traditionally been imposed on translation sway. I am interested here in the forces, pressures, channels of guidance that influence the production and reception of translations. Chapter 2, then, introduces Venuti’s concept of the interpretant as specifically a channel of sway – but with a series of “friendly amendments” proposed in response to Charles Martindale’s complaint that ideological analysis tends to reduce human creativity and aesthetic beauty to mechanistic causality. One of my goals in the book, in fact, is to expand Venuti’s model of the interpretant so as to be able to explain aesthetic phenomena like “beauty.” At the end of Chapter 2 I also briefly introduce my somatic model of human interaction. Chapter 3 is a long case study of a single translator, Alex. Matson (1888–1972), a bilingual and bicultural Finn who translated primarily literary texts from English to Finnish and from Finnish to English. (In his publications he always abbreviated his first name with a period, and I have followed his lead here.) I look closely at his translations into Finnish of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and William Faulkner’s Wild Palms and As I Lay Dying, and his translations into English of Aleksis Kivi’s 1870 novel Seven Brothers and several works by Aino Kallas and F. E. Sillanpää. My project in this chapter is to test Venuti’s concept of the “formal” interpretant against a complex translation history, and in the process expand the model to incorporate rhetorical situation. The model I offer at the end of the chapter suggests that there are rhetorical interpretants guiding our interactions with other people; that rhetorical interpretants, following Aristotle, might be



Preface 

divided into logical interpretants (governing structure), pathetic interpretants (governing affective interaction), and ethical interpretants (governing the perception of character); and that Venuti’s two types of interpretant, the formal and the thematic, should be seen as subcategories of the logical interpretant. In Chapter 4 I pull back from the close analysis of specific translations to rethink the interactive (rhetorical) spatiotemporal dynamic governing foreignism, which Venuti is now presenting as one of two important formal interpretants. Venuti tends to suspend his conceptualizations of foreignism in an odd limbo between a formalist or objectivist mode in which it is built into and stably recognizable in the text, and a rhetorical mode in which it can and should have an impact on each individual target reader – but is never quite to be defined in terms of its rhetorical impact on real readers. I suggest here that the lingering traces of objectivism in Venuti’s theorization are unworkable and must be banished. What remains is far more complex than Venuti’s conceptualizations, but at least the resulting complexity is something that lends itself to detailed analysis. Chapter 5 is another case study of a specific translation history, this time one to which Venuti (2008: 45–48) devotes the last few pages of the recent article that is my focus throughout, namely the rival English translations of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov by Constance Garnett in 1912 and by Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky in 1990. What I find, by studying a longish passage stereoscopically, is that the two translations do not differ significantly – and the notion that they do, that Garnett naturalizes and Pevear and Volokhonsky foreignize, which Venuti takes from Emerson (1991) and May (1994), moves me into a broader reformulation of the interpretants governing not only how we translate but how we theorize translation. Finally, in Chapter 6 I turn briefly to Mona Baker’s (2006) extraordinarily fecund tracing of a narrative paradigm for the study of translation, in Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account. My argument there, as I began to suggest above, is that the true radical core of the narrative is itself a prenarrative impulse to impose narrative structure on experience – and that another word for that core might indeed by the interpretant, as organized by ideosomatic regimes. The obvious imbalance between my four chapters (2–5) on a single article by Venuti and a single chapter (6) on a whole book by Baker may deserve a word or two of explanation. I originally planned to divide the book into two parts of equal length, one devoted to Venuti and the interpretant, the other to Baker and narrativity; what I found as I proceeded, however, was that the two sections dovetailed in significant ways, so that many of the issues that I wanted to raise with Baker turned up in my discussion of Venuti, and did not need to be rehashed. In addition, the theoretical component in Baker’s discussion of narrativity that specifically addresses translational sway turned out to be far less elaborate than the sway-related

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

aspects of Venuti’s theory of translational interpretants. Baker’s book is actually far more intensively and extensively oriented to the theorization of narrativity than it is to the theorization of translational sway; as I note in the beginning of Chapter 6, her book might more accurately be titled not Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account but Narrative and Conflict, With Some Examples from Journalism, Translation, and Interpreting. As my book stands now, therefore, it is a theoretical study of translational sway with a dual focus on the interpretant and narrativity, but with the interpretant as its primary focus and narrativity as theoretical counterpoint, to show how the interpretant works in narrativization as well as translation. Since Baker’s translation- and interpreting-based examples also ground a discussion of sway much more obviously in the somatics of translation than do Venuti’s, Chapter 6 also allows me to explore the sway of regulatory affect in the narrativization of translated and interpreted texts.

Acknowledgments This book was initially born out of conference papers, and I am indebted to the conveners of and participants in the various conferences at which I presented snippets of my argument here: Chapter 4, the oldest piece, was commissioned for the Literary Division’s Marilyn Gaddis Rose Keynote Lecture at the American Translators Association in New Orleans, November 1–4, 2006, and subsequently presented as the Rosenblatt Distinguished Lecture in Translation Studies at Florida Atlantic University, April 19, 2007, as a distinguished lecture and colloquium at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities, March 3–4, 2008, and at Beijing University, Beijing Foreign Languages University, and Nankai University, the last week of October, 2008. Thanks especially to Marilyn Gaddis Rose at Binghamton, Jan Hokenson at Florida Atlantic, Jill Morawski at Wesleyan, and Zhu Lin at Nankai University. Thanks also to Brian Baer for publishing the article version in TIS: Translation and Interpreting Studies, and for permission to reprint. A version of Chapter 2 (through 2.3) was presented at the Translation History conference organized at Okan University in Istanbul, Turkey, September 25–27, 2009; another version (mostly consisting of 2.4) was presented in the retranslation panel at the Modern Language Association meeting in Philadelphia, December 27–30, 2009. Thanks especially to Michaela Wolf at the University of Graz, Cemal Demircioğlu at Okan University, Carol O’Sullivan at the University of Portsmouth, and Julie Chandler Hayes at U Mass Amherst. Chapter 5 was originally intended as a brief discussion to be incorporated into the paper for the Istanbul conference; as I wrote it, it kept expanding until it burst its confines and became one of the longest chapters in the book. Ivan Delazari of St. Petersburg State University and Galina Solomatina of Voronezh State Pedagogical University helped me think through the Dostoevsky passage in Russian, and Ivan read the chapter and made detailed comments on both my understanding of the Russian and my argument in general. A version of Chapter 6 was presented at the Fifth CIATI Conference in São Paulo, Brazil, May 17–20, 2010, and again at the Forum on Translation and Globalization at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, Sichuan, China, July 8–10, 2010, with Mona Baker as respondent. Thanks to Mona for her comments, and to Prof. Guo Yangsheng for inviting me.

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

Chapter 3 was not written for a conference, but was first inspired by conversations with Finnish historians of literary translation at the Translation Studies Conference at the University of Eastern Finland in Joensuu, December 11–12, 2009, especially Ritva Leppihalme, who sent me her paper comparing the English translations of Väinö Linna by Alex. Matson and Richard Impola. Ritva also read that chapter and wrote long and detailed and extraordinarily helpful comments on it, and put me in touch with her Ph.D. student Hilkka Pekkanen, who was just completing a quantitative study of the style of Alex. Matson’s translations. Based on an excellent paper Outi Paloposki gave at the conference, I sent her first Chapter 3, and then, eventually, as she kept wanting more, the entire manuscript, and her comments were very helpful. Thanks also to my old friend Riitta Oittinen, who was not at the Joensuu conference but with whom I discussed similar topics over dinner in Tampere the night before, and who read and commented usefully on Chapter 3 as well. A drastically abbreviated version of the chapter was presented in a talk given to the English department at the University of Jyväskylä on December 13, 2010; thanks to Arja Piirainen-Marsh for arranging that event and to the various audience members who asked useful questions. Thanks also, as always, to the indefatigable people in the Interlibrary Loan office at the University of Mississippi, who took great pride in tracking down the more obscure Finnish works I ordered from them for Chapter 3; and, when they were unable to locate Alex. Matson’s 1947 translation of Joyce’s Portrait, my oldest daughter Laura Robinson spent an afternoon in the University of Helsinki library scanning pages for me. Yrjö Varpio also kindly scanned the relevant pages from his 1971 book on Alex. Matson and emailed them to me, and answered numerous questions I had about the material.

chapter 1

Introduction Translation and sway

Why do translators make mistakes? Put that way, the question does not seem particularly interesting: translators make mistakes because all human beings make mistakes; because to err is human. Translators don’t always know enough: they confuse the meaning of a sentence in the source text; they miss allusions; they fail to hear certain connotations or nuances of the target-language word or phrase they use. And they don’t always exert enough rational control over the translation process: their eye skips over a word or phrase or even whole sentence, or sees “affect” as “effect”; they think they know a word that they really ought to look up; they do not analyze the syntax of a problematic sentence; they are inattentive to the pragmatics (indirect speech acts, implicatures) of the source text. The question becomes more interesting, though, when we ask why translators translate in ways that they believe are correct, and might even defend as the best possible translation, but that later readers identify as erroneous. This broader focus would incorporate the problem of translator bias, which a number of translation theorists have been exploring recently under the rubric of “narrativity”: as Giuliana Shiavi (1996) notes, “there is always a teller in a tale,” and the translator of a text is its “teller” or narrator. This is not just a matter of propagandistic translation; the bias that is constitutive of narrative point of view demonstrably shapes the interpretive work done even by translators who strive for absolute neutrality. If unconscious bias can sway this scrupulously neutral translator into phrasings that are later condemned as erroneous, what shall we say about translation norms? Are translation norms not also a form of translator sway? Ever since his first theorization of translation norms in 1976, developed in a paper at the Catholic University of Leuven and published in his first book In Search of a Theory of Translation, Gideon Toury (1980: 51) has insisted on understanding translation as at least partially guided, shaped, organized by norms: “There is a point,” he writes there, “in assuming the existence of norms only in situations which in principle allow for several variations of behavior. Such variations are either meaningless, being cases of free variation, or patterned, that is, directed and regulated by norms” (emphasis added).

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

Would it be stretching Toury’s formulation excessively to suggest that translation norms are another form of bias?1 They would, of course, be biases approved and supported by the community that has constructed them as norms, and thus would not likely be widely identified as bias, a word that tends to carry a negative connotation signaling a motivated deviation from fact or truth (which is to say, from group norms). But if the only significant difference between norms and biases is that norms have group approval and biases do not, surely it makes sense to subsume both into a common category? In fact my suggestion is not the tendentious one that norms and biases be subsumed into the latter, but rather that both be considered forms of sway. Schematically: the sway of a norm maintained by Group A may be identified as the sway of bias by members of Group B, who, if they do make such a charge, will also be inclined to brand translations “directed and regulated” by those norms as errors. Let us begin untangling this skein at the conservative end: with error analysis. 1.1 The question of error There is a famous case of translation error in the Septuagint rendering of Isaiah 7:14’s almah “young girl/woman”; the 1970 New English Bible correctly but controversially renders the key phrase as “a young woman is with child.” But the thirdcentury-BCE translators of the Septuagint rendered almah as parthenos “virgin,” and so unwittingly laid a significant part of the mythological groundwork for Christianity. Why? Was it perhaps not an error at all? Some Bible scholars have argued that almah and bethulah in the diasporic Hebrew of the day were more or less equivalent synonyms for virgin, making this a case of what Toury calls “free variation,” and thus “meaningless” in terms of sway. Another explanatory model would insist that it was an error, but a mere slip, a sheer accident of ignorance or incompetence, and so equally meaningless in terms of sway. Yet a third model would be the early legend according to which the Septuagint translators were inspired to translate thus by God. As Augustine writes in On Christian Doctrine (Robinson 1997a: 34): And in emending Latin translations [of the Bible], Greek translations are to be consulted, of which the Septuagint carries most authority in so far as the Old Testament is concerned. In all the more learned churches it is now said that this translation was so inspired by the Holy Spirit that many men spoke as if with the mouth of one. It is said and attested by many of not unworthy faith that, although the translators were separated in various cells while they worked, nothing was to be found in any version that was not found in the same words and with the same order of words in all of the others. Who would compare any other authority with this, or, much less, prefer another?



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

Translating almah as parthenos, in other words, was not an error, but divine inspiration: the Holy Spirit put the foreknowledge of Jesus’ virgin birth into the translators’ minds nearly three centuries before it would happen, and guided them to the prophetically correct translation. This would be yet another channel of sway: neither norms nor bias but direct supernatural intervention. Possibly listening to his friend Jerome – who unlike Augustine could compare the Greek translation to the Hebrew original, and wondered in Preface to the Pentateuch “who was the first lying author to construct the seventy cells at Alexandria, in which they were separated and yet all wrote the same words” (Robinson 1997a: 30), even though the best authorities had reported that they all conferred together – Augustine (ibid: 34) also considers another possibility: But even if they conferred and arrived at a single opinion on the basis of common judgment and consent, it is not right or proper for any man, no matter how learned, to seek to emend the consensus of so many older and more learned men. Therefore, even though something is found in Hebrew versions different from what they have set down, I think we should cede to the divine dispensation by which they worked to the end that the books which the Jewish nation refused to transmit to other peoples, either out of envy or for religious reasons, might be revealed so early, by the authority and power of King Ptolemy, to the nations which in the future were to believe in Our Lord. It may be that the Holy Spirit judged that they should translate in a manner befitting the people whom they addressed and that they should speak as if with one voice. Yet, as I have said before, a comparison with those translators who adhered most closely to the words of the original is not without use in explaining their meaning. Latin translations of the Old Testament, as I set out to say, are to be emended on the authority of the Greeks, and especially on the authority of those who, although there were seventy, are said to have spoken as if with one voice.

In other words, even if the Seventy were not divinely inspired to translate almah as parthenos, but settled upon that translation in a purely secular fashion, by conferring and agreeing, the sheer cultural authority of that translation makes it right, or at least makes it wrong to question it: “it is not right or proper for any man, no matter how learned, to seek to emend the consensus of so many older and more learned men.” And of course Augustine doesn’t really believe that the translation process was entirely secular: the conclusion he draws from this insistence on cultural authority is again that “therefore, even though something is found in Hebrew versions different from what they have set down, I think we should cede to the divine dispensation by which they worked.” This does not explain the Septuagint translators’ error, of course; but clearly some powerful form of sway is at work in Augustine’s response to that error. He is quite

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

nakedly saying that no matter how the translators settled upon parthenos for almah, it is not an error. We are not even to consider the possibility that it might be wrong. Augustine’s approach is still very much with us today, of course. The idea that parthenos for almah was a slip, a mistake, a translators’ booboo, is understandably anathema to conservative Christians; and conservative Christian intellectuals, who cannot resort to the stratagem used by the laity – just ignore the problem – find themselves very much in Augustine’s camp. Here for example is Jay P. Green, Sr. (1996: vii): The marketplace is being glutted with new books which are being represented as versions of the Bible. Each one claims to be the very word of God, yet there are literally thousands of differences between them – and such differences as to cause one to discern that there is much disagreement as to which Greek words are to be translated, or paraphrased. In one way the new versions agree: they all leave out dozens of references to the deity of Jesus Christ, and they add words which tend to question His virgin birth, His substitutionary, fully satisfying atonement. This is due to their decision to depend upon an Alexandrian text-base, instead of that body of God’s words which has been universally received and believed in for nineteen centuries, known to us as the Received Text. These new versions are not only marked by additions, but also by subtractions, since some four whole pages of words, phrases, sentences, and verses have been omitted by these new versions. And these are words attested to as God’s words by overwhelming evidence contained in all the Greek manuscripts, in the ancient versions, in the writings of the early fathers – and these from every inhabited land on the earth where Christianity has been.

The confusing welter of competing texts is here reduced to a simple binary: “an Alexandrian textbase,” which is corrupt (because compiled with a purely secular attention to textual consistency), and “that body of God’s words which has been universally received and believed in for nineteen centuries, known to us as the Received Text.” As Augustine phrases the exact same attitude, “it is not right or proper for any man, no matter how learned, to seek to emend the consensus of so many older and more learned men.” For conservative Christians, this is normative thinking, and thus a source of correct and trustworthy Bible translation. For everyone else, it is bias, and thus – at least potentially, and in the case of Isaiah 7:14 patently – a source of translation error. Or take a less famous example: in Ruth 3:4, the young widow Ruth’s motherin-law Naomi tells her to wait until Boaz is asleep, and then, according to King James’ translators, “thou shalt go in, and uncover his feet, and lay thee down; and he will tell thee what thou shalt do.” “Uncover his feet” is a literal translation of the Hebrew galah margelah; and most other modern English translations render the passage with the exact same literal phrasing.2 In fact this is the strategy adopted by almost every modern European translation:



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

– In 1534 that great scorner of literal Bible translation Martin Luther has “decke zu seinen Füßen auf ” (and later German translations, such as the 1871 Elberfelder Bibel, follow Luther) – Casiodoro de Reina in the Sagradas Escrituras of 1569 (revised by Cipriano de Valera in 1602, producing the translation known as the Reina-Valera Antigua) has “descubrirás los pies” (and later Spanish translations, such as the 1986 Biblia de las Américas, follow the Reina-Valera) – Giovanni Diodati in 1649 has “scoprilo da’ piedi” – Jean-Frédéric Ostervald in 1724 has “découvre ses pieds” (and later French translations, such as Louis Segond’s in 1871, give us exactly the same phrase) In the Latin Vulgate Jerome gives us a slightly wordier variation, in “discoperies pallium quo operitur a parte pedum” (remove the coverlet with which he is concealed from the region of the feet); and the 1927 Riveduta translation into Italian follows suit with “alzagli la coperta dalla parte de’ piedi,” as does The New English Bible – that radical provocation excoriated by conservative bishops and people like Jay P. Green, Sr., for correcting the Septuagint’s mistranslation of almah – with “turn back the covering at his feet.” Strikingly, the Douay-Rheims translators in 1609, absolutely committed to translating literally from Jerome’s Latin, introduce a significant revision with “lift up the clothes wherewith he is covered towards his feet” (my emphasis), apparently misreading Jerome’s a + ablative “from” as ad + accusative “toward.” Jerome’s image, obviously, is of a blanket being folded up off the feet; the Douay-Rheims translators, supposedly faithful to Jerome, start at the other end of Boaz’s body, at his chest, and suggest that Ruth turn the coverlet down toward his feet. The question these more or less literal translations fail to ask, of course, is why Ruth should uncover Boaz’s feet at all – what the semiotics of this gesture could possibly have been. Is this some sort of ancient Hebrew tradition? Marvin H. Pope (1992: 721) offers an explanation: Hebrew regel “foot, leg” and its plural derivatives were sometimes used in biblical Hebrew as euphemisms for male and female genitalia. “Covering the feet” in Judges 3:24 means urinating; “the water of the feet” in 2 Kings 18:27 is urine; “the hair of the feet” in Isaiah 7:20 is pubic hair. To uncover Boaz’s “feet” in Ruth 3:4 is to therefore lift his skirt or tunic and expose his genitals. “Uncover his feet,” then, is a fairly obvious translation error: the actual physical (genital) meaning of the Hebrew phrase is lost or obscured through overly restrictive attention to the literal meaning of the word margelah. Again, why have so many Bible translators and translation committees over the past four centuries – the vast majority – made this error? Was it through insufficient knowledge? Did the various translators simply not know what the ancient Hebrews meant by

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

margelah? That’s entirely possible, of course; indeed the fact that almost every translation I’ve looked at has the straightforward literal “uncover his feet” rather than some inventively awkward evasion might well be taken as support for that conclusion. Did translators, not understanding Naomi’s advice to uncover Boaz’s feet, wrap themselves in the warm secure cloak of literalism, and move on? As I say, inventively awkward evasions are rare, but two variants of more or less the same evasion can be found in Today’s English Version and The Message: “lift the covers and lie down at his feet” (TEV) and “lie at his feet to let him know that you are available to him for marriage” (Message). In both translations the feet remain; all the two translation committees have done is to further obscure the original advice to uncover Boaz’s genitals by making the feet markers for a general area in which Ruth is to lie down (the Message translators further adding a faux-anthropological justification for the oddness of Naomi’s advice). Eugene Nida was of course the intellectual powerhouse behind the United Bible Societies’ TEV, and, as he himself once told me, for decades was perceived as a dangerous radical in Bible translation circles for following Luther in insisting on translations that conveyed the actual meaning of the original text in language that the ordinary modern reader would understand. In his famous theoretical terms, obviously, “uncover his feet” would be formal equivalence; one can imagine Nida railing against the absurdity that formal equivalence produces here.3 But “lift the covers and lie down at his feet” is not dynamic equivalence; it is what we might call camouflage equivalence, rearranging the semantic elements of the original (“uncovering” and “feet”) in a plausible way that disguises their dynamic meaning. Surely Nida would have agreed, at least privately, that the dynamic equivalent of the euphemism in galah margelah, and thus a translation conforming to his own theoretical orientation, would be something like “uncover his middle leg”? Should we imagine Nida attempting to convince the UBS translation committee to render galah margelah with some such modern euphemism? Perhaps that is going too far; but whether it was the committee’s decision to overrule Nida, or Nida agreed that having Ruth lie down at Boaz’s feet was the best possible English translation, or Nida was not even a party to the decision-making process, in Nida’s theoretical terms the TEV translation of galah margelah is an error. Some or all of these translators may well have mistranslated the original Hebrew out of ignorance, but there is of course a far likelier explanation: they were embarrassed, or they were afraid that churchgoers hearing the passage read aloud in church would be embarrassed, or they wanted to protect children from such sexual images. In other words, we can speculate that the various mistranslations of galah margelah are the product of censorship – they were made not for doctrinal reasons, like defenses of the Septuagint mistranslation of almah, without which there is no Old Testament anticipation of the virgin birth, but out of pressure from



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

social taboos on talk of sexuality. But again social taboos are norms for the groups that are subject to those taboos, and distortive biases for those who are not. 1.2 The Brafmans on sway While it is, as I say, entirely possible that the Septuagint translators rendered almah as parthenos out of ignorance or inattention, and that one or more modern European translators rendered margelah as feet out of ignorance or kneejerk literalism, the sheer resistance of these mistranslations to correction as they are replicated and defended over the centuries suggests that they are shaped and organized by that generalized force that I’m following Ori and Rom Brafman (2008) in calling sway – or, in the terms they use in their subtitle, The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. They identify several different channels of sway: – Loss-aversion: having invested time, money, energy, emotions, etc. in a belief or behavior, we tend to cling to it even as it increasingly proves erroneous or destructive, so as not to waste our investment in it – Commitment: having committed our loyalties to a group, a set of values or beliefs or norms, or a course of action, we stick to it, lest others perceive us as flighty and inconsistent – Value-attribution: we tend to assume that people or things valued highly by society will be more worthwhile, more likely to be true and honest and decent and trustworthy, than people or things valued less highly by society – Altruism/Selfishness: we seem to have a need to balance between the two, so that too naked an appeal to our selfishness may incline us to be more altruistic, and too naked an appeal to our altruism may incline us to be more selfish – The chameleon effect: we tend to be shaped, not just in our self-conceptions but in our behavior and even our cognitive and affective functioning, by how others see us – Fairness: our sense of what’s fair will often override rational considerations As a tentative beginning, we might venture the guess that Augustine and later defenders of the Isaiah 7:14 mistranslation were swayed by commitment, specifically to the Christian doctrine of the virgin birth; and that the mistranslators of galah margelah were swayed by value-attribution, the assumption that a sacred text like the Bible couldn’t possibly be (portrayed as) describing lewd sexual seductions. We could also use this list heuristically to direct our attention to other possible forms of translation sway. We might detect the sway of loss-aversion, for example, when we’re halfway through translating a novel and gradually begin to suspect that the style we’ve developed for it is subtly but significantly wrong, but feel reluctant

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

Translation and the Problem of Sway

to go back and revise the first half of the book to fit our new sense of the right way to proceed. And if the chameleon effect might be used to study the process by which translators mimic the styles of (or temporarily “become”) the authors they translate, that effect combined with the tension between altruism and selfishness might offer an explanatory avenue into the epiphenomenon called fidelity or equivalence. But that is not how I plan to proceed. Instead, I want to look at some actual translations and analyses of translations and let a rough typology of translation sway emerge from that material. For example, I suggested above that the mistranslations of galah margelah might have been produced out of ignorance or kneejerk literalism: obviously in that tentative formulation “kneejerk literalism” is itself a kind of sway, but not one of those the Brafmans identify; and exploring the sway a sequence of source-text words separated by spaces can wield over the translator would require considerable close attention to the cognitive and perhaps even affective processes of translation. Along the way I also want to rethink some basic assumptions that the Brafmans bring to the study of sway – for example their inclination to see sway as the “irresistible pull of irrational behavior.” Their theoretical default setting is rationalist and individualist: praiseworthy behavior is always rationally governed by the individual, and “sway” is always an irrational and often group-influenced deviation from that rationalist ideal. In that previous paragraph, for example, I suggested that the translational epiphenomena traditionally singled out for highest praise, the faithful translator imitating the style of the original, might be thought of as achieved through sway. If sway is fundamentally irrational, does that mean that translation is an inherently irrational activity in which the translator surrenders rational control of the writing self and lets the source author or source text channel the translation through him or her? Possibly; as its subtitle suggests, my book Who Translates? (Robinson 2001) is an exploration of “translator subjectivities beyond reason.” But the complex conclusions I came to in that book were very far from the simple binary that the Brafman model might posit, according to which writers are rationalist creatures who produce original texts in complete control of their expressive intentions and translators are the passive irrational channels of other people’s expressive intentions. At the very least the notion that the chameleon effect might generate praiseworthy effects should help us avoid the Brafmans’ rather simplistic notion that rational action is good and surrendering to sway is bad. And group dynamics for the Brafmans are clearly the exception that proves the individualistic rule. To their minds the moment when they turn from individuals to groups is the last chapter of their book: “Something strange happens,”



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

they write in that chapter’s opening lines, “when you put people in groups. They take on new roles, form ‘in group’ alliances, get swept up by extreme stances, and succumb to peer pressure. In a group setting, the reasonableness of our thinking can be distorted and compromised. So it’s not surprising that the hidden sways we have discussed so far reveal themselves just as prominently within a group setting” (Brafman and Brafman 2008: 150). The implication in this suggestion is obviously that they are just now turning to a consideration of these “hidden sways” in a “group setting,” that their discussion of sways in their first seven chapters was all individualistic, all focused on the swaying or skewing – irrationalizing – of the decision-making processes going on inside the heads of isolated individuals. This is patently not the case. In fact every single case they discuss in the book involves group dynamics. The story with which they begin Chapter 1, and to which they recur throughout the book, is the 1977 crash of KLM Flight 4805 over the runway at Teneriffe; what they think they are showing throughout the book is how that crash was caused by irrational behavior (“sway”) in Captain Jacob Van Zanten, a pilot of legendary skill and an unblemished record who was then head of KLM’s safety program. But strikingly, their own report of the safety board’s diagnosis of the problems that led to the crash does not primarily deal with individual failures. It is all about the hierarchical structure of the group dynamics in the cockpit, leading subordinates to let a tired or distracted captain crash the plane rather than risking being perceived as insubordinate. What I find initially interesting about the deep-seated assumptions coursing through the Brafmans’ claims is that for most of the book the authors themselves are on their own terms just as guilty of “irrational behavior” as Captain Van Zanten and his crew. They too repeatedly turn a blind eye to the “objective information” – both research findings and stories from the newspapers like the crash of KLM Flight 4805 – that they themselves have painstakingly accumulated, analyzed, and presented. The information that they adduce in the book shows with overwhelming clarity both (a) that sway is almost always a group dynamic, not typically something that happens inside individual nervous systems, and (b) that the remedies society has developed to counteract that group dynamic are not the operation of King Reason in each person’s head but new resistive group dynamics, like training first officers in the cockpit to challenge or even countermand the pilot’s dangerous decisions – training them to overcome (in the terminology they borrow from Kantor 1976, to “block”4) their conditioning to obey a superior officer. They do finally state this, in their final chapter – the importance of the blocker for the achievement of group rationality – but as I say their presentation of the phenomenon of sway throughout remains individualistic and rationalistic, as if the norm were the strong rational individual sifting through and considering the evidence and then making a calm rational decision.

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

Translation and the Problem of Sway

And of course it is. This is their norm. What’s interesting, though, is that it’s a norm to which they are in their own terms “irrationally” committed, committed as a form or channel of “sway,” in flagrant but unnoticed disregard for nearly all the evidence they review in the book. What is even more interesting about this commitment, of course, is that they patently aren’t the only ones who think this way. Their rationalist individualism is, in fact, a group norm, or what we call an ideology. It is an assumption or structure of assumptions that in Kantor’s terms arises out of the Brafmans’ unquestioned support for rationalist liberalism: they are neither liberal initiators like John Locke and Jeremy Bentham, nor antiliberal blockers like Karl Marx, nor even observers like John Stuart Mill – they don’t notice that this group dynamic is operative in their book – but supporters. They go along with fundamental group initiatives, which are themselves by the twenty-first century so unconscious as themselves to be largely a form of nonobservant support. So hegemonic is this group norm in their (our) culture that conscious analytical awareness is really only required for resistance and, to a lesser extent, the kind of observation I’m doing here. Look back at those opening lines to their Chapter 8: “Something strange happens when you put people in groups. They take on new roles, form ‘in group’ alliances, get swept up by extreme stances, and succumb to peer pressure. In a group setting, the reasonableness of our thinking can be distorted and compromised.” What their unconscious support for rationalist individualism blinds them to here is that there is also something all-too-familiar that happens when people stay in their old groups for a long time – for centuries, in fact. They (we) continue to play old roles, and continue to support in-group alliances, without noticing themselves (ourselves) doing so. Having long since succumbed to peer pressure, they (we) get swept along by well-worn moderate stances called norms. And in our group setting, in our unconscious support for any current group dynamic of which we’re a part, all this conduces to the normative definition of our thinking as reasonable. What is unconsciously normative is de facto reasonable. To the cockpit crews of exhausted or otherwise temporarily incapacitated airline captains in decades past it has been normative, hence reasonable, hence rational, to refrain from shrieking “abort, you idiot!” and so let him crash the plane; the new safety measures the Brafmans report entail retraining cockpit crews not just to behave differently but to feel the normative pressures of groups differently, and thus also to redefine behavioral group rationality (challenge twice, with escalating urgency, and if the second challenge fails, take control of the plane). The difference between obeying the chain of command and letting the pilot crash the plane and breaking the chain of command in order to save hundreds of lives is not a difference between “irrationality” and “rationality”; it’s one between competing rationalities. The former rationality in most cases saves lives; in those rare cases where



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

the captain is mentally incapacitated in some way, it endangers lives. What the Brafmans are theorizing in the new safety measures is not a move from irrationality to rationality; it is a move from a dangerously inflexible rationality to a more flexible and therefore safer rationality. And the rationalities in both cases are specifically group dynamics. To take that one step further, the only difference between the old group rationality that mandates strict obedience to the chain of command in airplane cockpits and the group rationality of the Brafmans’ normative assumptions about reason and the individual is that the Brafmans’ assumptions don’t endanger the lives of hundreds of passengers. Both are unnoticed and unquestioned forms of normative (ideological) sway. So utterly reasonable and “natural” and “right” is normative thinking, in fact, that it is extremely difficult for us “supporters” to come to understand it as a distortion or a compromise, as a group formation, as the product of a historical having-been-placed-in-a-group. In other words, sway is not just a disruption of rationality, as the Brafmans portray it; it is also a source of rationality. It is not just a disorganization of thought, a failure of thought, but a primary collective channel for the successful and effective organization of thought as well. As we begin to crawl up out of the anxious turbulence of the unconscious supporter’s role into the false calm of the observer’s role, we begin to feel the collective forces that sway us to think rationally, to plan ahead, to assess the success of past plans, to impose a careful checklist regime on our corporeal-becoming-affective-becoming-conative-becoming-cognitive behavior. What felt like a purely internal or individual reasoning power while we were mere supporters of the rationalist regime can now be observed being reticulated through the group, a channel of sway that is also a metaperspective on sway. 1.3 Gideon Toury on translation norms As Toury (1980: 51) first formulates the realm he charts for translation norms, it is a collection of “constraints,” which, he says, “can be described along a scale anchored between two extremes; objective, relatively absolute rules (in certain behavioral domains, even stable, formulated laws) on the one hand, and fully subjective idiosyncrasies on the other. In between these two poles lies a middle-ground occupied by intersubjective factors, commonly designated ‘norms.’ The norms themselves do not occupy merely one point of the scale, but a graduated section of the entire continuum.” Norms, then, occupy the entire middle ground between explicit rules or laws and “fully subjective idiosyncrasies,” and are defined as “the translation of general values or ideas shared by a certain community – as to what is right and wrong, adequate and inadequate – into specific performance-instructions

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

Translation and the Problem of Sway

appropriate for and applicable to specific situations, providing they are not [yet] formulated as laws” (Toury 1980: 51; square brackets Toury’s). That phrase “performance-instructions” makes norms sound like conscious and analytical rules that individuals apply in specific situations; indeed while Toury (1980: 54) writes of “the translator’s commitment to the operational norms for his translation” (emphasis added), using a term that the Brafmans adopt as a description of one major channel of sway, he also tends to describe operational norms “as a model in accordance with which translations subject to them are actually formulated” (1980: 55), suggesting that the translator’s commitment to a given set of operational norms might well be conscious and analytical, like following a check-list. But of course the fact that Toury has excluded explicit rules from this middle ground of norms entails that norms are by definition not explicit but explicitable – inchoate and unstated but capable of being further “translated” (explicitated) as rules or instructions. In Freudian terms, norms are preconscious: most commonly operating without the individual’s conscious awareness, but available to conscious reflection and analysis if needed. Toury (1980: 51) goes on to say that “these instructions, the norms, are acquired – even internalized – by individual members of the community during the socialization process, and may be said to serve as criteria, in comparison with which actual instances of behavior are evaluated or judged by the group as a whole and by its members individually.” As internalized and thus individualized operationalizations of group values, norms channel collective regulatory impulses into individual behavior. What the individual is swayed by, then, when s/he is swayed by norms, is the practical wisdom of the community. If norms are a channel of sway, then, and are definitively distinguished in the sociological literature from both explicit rules and laws and “fully subjective idiosyncrasies,” does that mean that neither explicit rules and laws nor “fully subjective idiosyncrasies” are channels of sway? Not necessarily. Idiosyncrasies, freak whims, passing fancies, sudden impulses, random urges, vagaries and caprices are all in the realm once thought to be random but colonized for the study of unconscious sway by Freud and his followers, especially beginning in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and continuing at least through the Brafmans’ Sway. And once norms are explicitated as rules or laws, adherence to them is thought to be conscious and rational and therefore not a channel of sway; but of course we usually obey rules and laws even when a representative of the enforcing power is not aiming a gun at us and threatening us with death if we fail to comply, and in fact in most of our lives we are not highly conscious of obeying rules and laws, which suggests that rules and laws too are mostly internalized, and activate our compliance inwardly and individually.5 I am, then, interested in a wide variety of forces or impulses that sway the translator:



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

a. those of which we (whatever group(s) we happen to construct ourselves as representing at any given time) approve – norms, rules, laws, leading to translations that we believe to be correct, successful, appropriate – but may at some point be reinterpreted as cases of (b); b. those of which we disapprove – biases, prejudices, leading to translations that we believe to be incorrect, failed, inappropriate, misleading, awkward, or perverse – but may originally have been conceived as (a); c. those of which the translator or the target reader or the translation scholar is unconscious, preconscious, or fully conscious. I am, however, assuming that sway is always a group phenomenon, part of some larger group dynamic, and that as such it is always driven by a group-organized rationality. 1.4 Venuti and Baker The key ideological sway-concepts that I will be highlighting in the book are taken from the recent work of two well-known translation scholars, Lawrence Venuti (Chapters 2–5) and Mona Baker (Chapter 6) – and I will be suggesting that the two concepts in question, Venuti’s “interpretant” and Baker’s “narrative,” are roughly synonymous, or rather that the sway-based core of the narrativization that Baker is primarily interested in is essentially synonymous with the interpretant. The interpretant, which Venuti borrows from Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–1958) via Umberto Eco (1979), is a semiotic concept and therefore imagistically more abstract than narrativity, which Baker borrows from social theory, and which imagistically points us toward story-telling and literary studies; but both are specifically channels of sway, ideological guides to interpretation. Both are also specifically theoretical constructs rather than empirically registered, measured, or tested objects in the world: while stories are narrated in the world, and Baker (2006) quotes quite a few of them, she is also at pains to distinguish the concept of narrativity that concerns her from the actual telling of stories. Of the four types of narratives that she distinguishes (Baker 2006: ch. 3), borrowing the conceptual framework of Somers (1992, 1997) and Somers and Gibson (1994), “ontological narratives” or “narratives of the self ” may be told to someone else but may also be unconscious orientations that can only be constructed interpretively by an observer; “public narratives” are “stories elaborated by and circulating among social and institutional formations larger than the individual” (Baker 2006: 33), but they may circulate through what Fredric Jameson (1981) calls the political unconscious as well; “conceptual” or “disciplinary narratives” are

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

specifically the organizing “myths” or “orientations” in any discipline or disciplinary camp; and “meta-narratives” or (Lyotard’s term) “master narratives” are the large-scale ideological frames “in which we are embedded as contemporary actors in history ... Progress, Decadence, Industrialization, Enlightenment, etc .” (Somers/ Gibson 1994: 61, quoted in Baker 2006: 44). One distinction we may want to draw between interpretants and narratives as channels of ideological sway, then, might be that interpretants are “smaller” and more localized than narratives, which by contrast seem big and splashy; as Venuti (2008: 30–40) elaborates Peirce’s interpretant, it tends to be a normative or quasinormative orientation first guiding the work of an individual translator, at what he calls the “metalinguistic level,” then guiding the evaluative response to the resulting translation by individual readers, at what he calls the “axiological level.” Interpretations of specific texts, whether source texts (at the metalinguistic level) or target texts (at the axiological level), are thus only apparently or superficially individualized events: the interpretant allows Venuti to analyze them in terms of larger ideological trends in a culture. Narrativity gives Baker a much larger canvas: the conflictuality of the modern world. But again, I suggest that this difference is largely imagistic: Venuti and Baker are both primarily interested in the sway wielded by large-scale ideological orientations over individual decision-making. The primary distinction I will be drawing between interpretants and narratives, therefore, will lie elsewhere, arising in a sense out of Venuti’s classification of interpretants into the “formal” and “thematic”: Venuti himself is clearly most interested in the formal interpretant, which guides the (interpretive/metalinguistic) choice of a formal translation strategy and the target reader’s (evaluative/axiological) response to the formal strategy used, most centrally for Venuti “fluency” vs. “foreignism”; Baker’s narratives are all, I suggest, “thematic interpretants” writ large, imposing “thematized” or propositionalized views or beliefs on events. I will, therefore, be dealing with formal interpretants (naturalization and foreignization) in Chapters 2–5 and thematic interpretants or narratives in Chapter 6. The other significant difference between Venuti and Baker is that Venuti is utopian in his thinking, placing great activist or “positive” hope and trust in the formal interpretant of foreignization as a vehicle of societal transformation, while Baker is more obviously resigned to the inevitability of political conflict and directs her activist hope only to the “negative” goal of critique. Anthony Pym (1996: 166) notoriously caricatures Venuti’s utopianism by comparing it to “the machines E. P. Thompson (1978) used in order to illustrate Althusser’s social models many years ago, with neat instructions like ‘For Revolution X, pull lever B’”: it does indeed sometimes seem as if Venuti oversimplifies and exaggerates the role translators might play in social transformation. For Baker (2006: 6), by contrast, we may not be able to change anything, we too may be locked into our own



Chapter 1.╇ Introduction

narratives, but at least through hard intellectual work we may be capable of raising our own and others’ awareness of the sway narratives have over us: Finally, much of what I have to say in this book will be interpreted as a strong condemnation of US, UK and Israeli policies toward the so-called third world in general and the Arab World in particular. I make no apologies for this stance. However, the fact that I have chosen to focus on the narratives of the political elites in particular regions must not be taken to imply that I see these elites and their narratives as representative of the relevant societies as a whole. Indeed, much of the critique of US, UK and Israeli policies I draw on here comes from American, British and Israeli sources. I am also aware that Arab and Islamic societies generate their own highly questionable narratives, often fuelling the very conflicts that continue to tear these regions apart. I have chosen to prioritize the narratives of the Anglo-American and Israeli political elites because, in my own narrative of current conflicts, they deserve special attention given the enormous war and media machines they have at their disposal.

I personally find this stance admirable and honest, and a reflection of the dual hope that critique holds for Baker: that it may help us become more aware of the deleterious effects not only of our political opponents’ narratives, but of our own as well. In contrast with Venuti’s utopianism, too, I find Baker’s realism/pessimism about the prospect of significant political change – a cessation of hostilities, say – refreshing. But I still find myself drawn to the vague gray middle between these two extremes: to an exploration of what small and local hope there may be for significant change.

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chapter 2

Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant



I have already noted that a Sign has an Object and an Interpretant, the latter being that which the Sign produces in the Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter by determining the latter to a feeling, to an exertion, or to a Sign, which determination is the Interpretant.

(Peirce 1931–1958: 4.536)

The notion that the translator’s work is swayed by forces outside his or her own head is not new, of course: for more than two millennia translation has been thought to proceed under the sway of at least the source text, or the source author, or even the entire source culture. So intrinsic is this assumption to the broadest and deepest conceptions of translation we have inherited from the past that even the legendary claims according to which a given translation was dictated by God, or the Holy Spirit, or the Muse, or the living otherworldly spirit of the dead source author seem to be nothing more than extreme forms of what we already believe about translation – of what translation is hegemonically thought to be, namely, under the sign of sway. In important ways the norm-theoretical methodology first developed by Gideon Toury (1980) for the study of translation is an expansion and explicitation of these assumptions about translational sway: the norms Toury theorizes are narrowly focused pressures built up in and wielded by culture and channeled to (internalized by) each professional translator for the collective regulation of translation. While one of the basic assumptions of Descriptive Translation Studies as developed out of James Holmes’ pioneering work by Toury and others is that the culture that wields the greatest influence over the act of translation is the target culture, not the source culture, Toury does recognize the normative sway of the source culture as well, as a preliminary and less insistent cultural fountainhead of translation norms; and in any case the recognition that the target culture in most cases wields greater influence over translation than the source culture does is “only” empirical, which is to say, not a significant theoretical advance over the conventional notion that the translator is swayed by textual/cultural forces. This is, I should note, not in the slightest to disparage Toury’s theoretical accomplishment, which is, obviously, monumental. All I mean is that norm-theoretical

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

approaches to the study of translation are in some sense implied in, and entailed by, the age-old conception of the translator as a slave, a servant, even a tool or an instrument wielded by the source text or the source author. Toury simply taught us to ask the critical question: how can a text, a series of black squiggles on a page, wield power or influence or sway over the translator? How can a text be imagined as having the kind of agency – intentionality and enforcement power – that would be required to dominate the work of the competent human professionals who process it? The only possible explanation for that sway is that it is channeled by culture – through norms if we find that sway admirable, through bias if we disapprove. The many cultural channels for that sway are the topic of this book. 2.1 Martindale on the translator’s free play I propose to begin my inquiry into those channels, however, by considering an argument that challenges their ubiquity, their inevitability – an argument that would free the translator, at least in certain cases, from all sway, even the sway of the source text. I refer to the “aesthetic” theory of translation offered by Charles Martindale (2008: 104): On the aesthetic model I am advancing, Dryden’s Ovid might be deemed a classic text, if, standing alone, it were judged to display outstanding aesthetic quality, for example along the lines I have sketched above. It might further be regarded as a classic translation, if, when set alongside the Latin text of Ovid, it were to prompt a lively play of the mental faculties of the reader, giving her an enriched experience of Ovid (something much less likely to happen with a purely functional translation such as a Loeb). As we have seen, the aesthetic welcomes proliferation; after Dryden’s translations (say) you have (potentially) two classics instead of one. It is often assumed that a translation primarily serves to reinforce an original; it may give that original greater power, but it depends on its authority. But within the aesthetic, there is no problem in letting the various works stand free.

“Stand free”: that freedom is specifically a freedom from sway. “The aesthetic” for Martindale is a sway-free zone: inside it no one is coerced by irrational forces from within or group pressures from without. “Within the aesthetic,” experiential enrichment is self-purposive, an autonomous value that “welcomes proliferation,” which is to say, welcomes new aesthetic or expressive freedom in whatever form and to whatever degree it appears. “Within the aesthetic,” therefore, translations are judged purely on the basis of their power to enrich the reader’s experience – no longer on the degree of their submission to the sway of the source text or source author. Martindale (ibid: 93) writes:



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 

A translation has another text (potentially) conjoined with it, so there is complexity for the mind to roam over. The complex and layered character of the text serves to provoke a free play of mind, involving both a direct encounter with the text we are reading and our memory of another text, in what becomes a new singular experience (‘this translation is beautiful’). The mental faculties operate as it were between the lines, in a sort of interlinear shuttle (of course a translation can also be read, perfectly satisfactorily, without any reference to an original at all, in a different singular experience). Our minds operate in the space opened up by the act of translation.

These remarks obviously bear primarily on the reader of translations, rather than the translator: the “free play of mind” Martindale is insisting we leave open is appreciative rather than creative. But at the end of his discussion of Dryden’s Ovid, Martindale (ibid: 104) adds: A functional or instrumental translation, including most of those used in Classical Civilization courses today, can thus be figured as distinct from an aesthetic translation, a translation for its own sake. An analysis attentive only to the ideological may fail to differentiate the two, assigning to all translations a definite end. But it was in no such spirit, but to release in dialogue with them a free play of his mental powers, a free play with unpredicted and unpredictable outcomes, that Dryden turned to Ovid and to the other ancient authors he so loved.

As Martindale here makes clear, he sets up his “aesthetic” or “art-for-art’s sake” theory of translation in explicit opposition to “an analysis attentive only to the ideological,” which, he says, will tend to assign each translation a “definite end,” based on a “watered-down version of the base/superstructure model” (ibid: 85): on his view, ideological analyses of translations and other texts are predetermined by established constellations of gender, class, race, and other ideological factors, so that “the critic knows what the ‘context’ of a text is, indeed what a ‘text’ is, before he or she has done any thinking or work” (ibid). The ideological translation scholar, Martindale argues, invariably fails to see the translation or the original as a singular text, possessing its own particular characteristics; this scholar will always reduce any text to an instantiation of something else, some other “political” context that serves as explanatory base. It should be clear here that the ideological sway that Martindale attacks is actually only the most recent instantiation of the default assumptions of all traditional thinking about translation, according to which, as I noted above, translation is definitively under the sign of sway – by definition subject to regulatory laws governing the reproduction of an existing text. Ideological analysis is clearly a pet peeve of Martindale’s, and he pauses numerous times in his article to take more or less irritable swipes at it; but the true target of his ire is any force, any analytical model, any form of sway that would limit the translator’s freedom, including

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

fidelity to the source text. What is truly revolutionary about his approach is that he would free translation from all sway. I confess to some sympathy with this notion. The Romantic impulse driving it, in fact, is not all that different from the impulse that drove my first book on translation, The Translator’s Turn (Robinson 1991), which specifically sought to liberate translators from instrumentalist, dualist, and perfectionist conceptions of their absolute submission to the source author or text. My argument in that book, as in later works, was that translators inevitably have more freedom than idealized instrumentalizations of their professional activity would allow; and while the analytical and theoretical burden of my studies of translation has been to trace the relative channels of sway that govern the translator’s work, there have always been readers who have imposed a conventional non distributio medii on my translation theories and taken me to be offering translators a carte blanche, an anything-goes mentality that Martindale too might be simplistically (but incorrectly) read as arguing for. I have long been interested in mapping out a middle realm between absolute instrumentality and absolute freedom, a realm in which translators’ expressive freedom is highly circumscribed but never completely stifled. To binary thinkers on the traditionalist or instrumentalist side of the theory wars that has sometimes seemed to mean that I am turning over all the traces, telling translators to do whatever they want, translate however they feel. To Martindale, viewing my middle ground from the standpoint of the opposite camp, it would almost certainly mean that I am still an ideological translation scholar, interested exclusively in translators’ bondage. “How translators feel,” after all, in my somatic theory is inevitably mostly shaped by the group. Translators do translate how they feel; but feelings are in large part conduits of social regulation. Ironically enough, the first article in the theory section of the Lianeri and Zajko collection in which Martindale’s (2008) article appears is a prime example of the kind of ideological analysis that he attacks, by the translation scholar perhaps most widely associated with that approach, Lawrence Venuti (2008) – and, unsurprisingly perhaps, Venuti’s article fails to conform to Martindale’s stereotype. It is, in fact, highly attentive to the singularities of specific texts. It does not reduce those texts to their ahistorical marvels, as Martindale would want; but neither does it reduce them to the predetermined ideological base of gender, class, and race. There is, however, in Venuti’s article a floating concept, borrowed from the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–1958) and developed further by Umberto Eco (1979) – the interpretant – that remains underdeveloped in his argument, and that, with further theorization, might well act as a kind of Martindalean Trojan Horse inside the walls of Venuti’s ideological analysis. Once inside, I suggest, it would not so much slaughter or maim or otherwise overthrow Venuti’s arguments as it would expand them, enrich them, enliven the stern objectivizing



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 

tendencies of ideological analysis with a phenomenological perspective. How, I want to ask, can a study of translational interpretants account for free play, the aesthetic pleasure we take in literary “beauty” or “power,” indeed the whole vague and complex phenomenology of “literariness”? 2.2 Venuti’s argument Venuti (2008: 27) begins by noting that “the foreign-language texts we call ‘classics’ do not merely attract translation, but eventually, when their copyright expires, become subject to multiple retranslations, as publishers scramble to transform the cultural capital those texts have acquired into economic capital.” Venuti also draws attention to the ways in which “translation functions as one cultural practice through which a foreign text attains the status of a classic: the very fact of translation not only implies that the text has been judged valuable enough to bring into another culture, but also increases this value by generating such promotional devices as jacket copy, endorsements, and advertisements and by enabling such diverse modes of reception as reviews, course adoptions, and scholarly research.” He then adds, quoting Maurice Blanchot: “Classical masterpieces live only in translation” (Blanchot 1971/1990: 84; quoted in Venuti 2008: 27). Venuti quotes Frank Kermode to the effect that “The books we call classics possess intrinsic qualities that endure, but possess also an openness to accommodation which keeps them alive under endlessly varying dispositions” (Kermode 1975/1983: 44; quoted in Venuti ibid), and modifies that only slightly by noting that the “accommodations” that keep classics alive “under endlessly varying dispositions” also tend to change the “intrinsic qualities that endure,” and thus also to change the ways in which classics endure – and that translation is only one of the many “varying dispositions” that can contribute to such change. Translations contribute in many different ways, but typically, Venuti (ibid: 29) argues, “by inscribing the foreign text with an interpretation that has achieved currency and in most cases dominance in academic or other powerful cultural institutions,” often institutions located in, and shaped by the cultural values of, the target culture. The phrase “inscribing the foreign text” seems strange at first, since in a literal sense the translator really only inscribes the “local text,” the translation; but of course the technical sense of “in-scription” in poststructuralist discourse entails the insertion into a text of discursive practices otherwise alien to it, so probably “inscribing the foreign text with an interpretation” here means something like reworking the foreign text as the local text. Venuti also notes, however, that “the interpretation that the translator inscribes will also revise the foreign comprehension and evaluation of the text in so far as the translator inevitably puts to work

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

patterns of linguistic usage, literary traditions and effects, and cultural values in the receiving situation, possibly in an effort to address specific readerships” (ibid: 29–30). The passivizing effect of intense and insistent nominalization favored by the discursivist poststructuralist tradition here mystifies the speech acts performed by individual translators and interpreters: it’s not, for Venuti, that someone local (from the target culture) interprets the text in one way, and that differs from how someone foreign (from the source culture) interprets it, and by “inscribing” the former into the translation the translator revises the former: it’s all abstract. The interpretation revises the foreign comprehension and evaluation – but interpretation is not someone interpreting, and comprehension and evaluation are not someone comprehending or evaluating; they are properties of the text, or they are discursive practices somehow closely tied to the text, so that “the foreign comprehension and evaluation” that the “interpretation that the translator inscribes” revises is not how people in the source culture understand the text. It may originally have been that, but it is no longer an active comprehending and evaluating going on in the source culture – meaning that Venuti is not talking about the act of reading the target text having a transformative effect on the way readers in the source culture understand and value the text. Thus when he goes on to say that, “in contributing to the canonicity of a foreign text, the translation leaves neither that text nor the receiving situation unaltered” (ibid: 30), he does not mean – though he does seem to be saying this – that the translation alters the source text as foreign text, i.e., as a text read and constructed and comprehended and evaluated in and by the source culture. The source text is a “foreign text” for Venuti in the sense that for him the translator definitively lives in the target culture, and picks up the text to be translated as something foreign, something from another country. The translator does not live in the source culture, translating into a target language that is foreign to the local readers, or to the translator him- or herself, or both; and the translator does not live in a bilingual culture, translating from one local language to the other. This is obviously a reductive idealization – in Chapter 3 we’ll see Alex. Matson, born in Finland, raised in England, and living by turns in England and Finland as he translates Finnish literature into English and English-language literature into Finnish – but it is a definitive one for Venuti. For me the most interesting question that this formulation begs, however, is: what is the “foreign text” that is thus revised? This question, which raises the problem of how people construct texts, begins to get me where I’m going with Venuti. Presumably, “the foreign text” for Venuti is not just black marks on the page; it is a construct, something that the reader builds imaginatively out of materials provided him or her by what we can simplistically describe as “the culture.” But which culture? Surely not the local culture, which again for Venuti is by definition the translation’s target culture, and which may in the aggregate be utterly ignorant of



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 

the language and culture that support “the foreign text.” The foreign text must, it would seem to go without saying, be constructed out of materials provided by, and according to instruction manuals written by, the foreign culture. We might want to say that “the foreign text” is a kind of simulacrum or microcosm of “the foreign culture”; but the way Venuti sets up his theoretical model – rightly, I think – what is revised by “the interpretation that the translator inscribes” is not the “text itself ” but something else, some mediatory X that he tentatively dubs “the foreign comprehension and evaluation of the text.” This mediatory X, this “mediatant,” it should be clear, is neither “the foreign text” qua text (or microcosm of the foreign culture) nor “the foreign culture” qua culture (or macrocosm of the foreign text), but an organizing force of some sort that stands between “the foreign text” and “the translator” and structures “the foreign text” according to rules or regularities developed in “the foreign culture.” Nowhere in his article does Venuti specifically define, or even identify, this mediatory X; but he does introduce an apparently unrelated concept that I think might very well be assimilated to it, namely Peirce’s “interpretant,” which he defines as “a pattern of use in a cultural practice that is performed and regulated within a social institution” (ibid: 32). In a footnote Venuti observes that “this term is defined differently by Peirce and Eco” (ibid: 32n); in fact the pages from A Theory of Semiotics (Eco 1979: 68–72) that Venuti cites suggest that what Eco does with the concept is not so much different from Peirce’s conception as it is a specification of Peirce’s early theorization of the interpretant, from the late 1860s, without even so much as a nod at his mature thinking on the interpretant post-1906 (which, as Short 2004: 214–15 shows, quite overturns the key ideas that Eco highlights). Eco (ibid: 68) writes: The interpretant is not the interpreter (even if a confusion of this type occasionally arises in Peirce). The interpretant is that which guarantees the validity of the sign, even in the absence of the interpreter. According to Peirce it is that which the sign produces in the quasi-mind which is the interpreter; but it can also be conceived as the definition of the representamen (and therefore its intension). However, the most fruitful hypothesis would seem to be that of conceiving the interpretant as another representation which is referred to the same ‘object’. In other words, in order to establish what the interpretant of a sign is, it is necessary to name it by means of another sign which in turn has another interpretant to be named by another sign and so on.

Note especially that near-plagiaristic paraphrase of the quotation from Peirce (1931–1958: 4.536) that I took as my epigraph for this chapter, according to which the interpretant is “that which the Sign produces in the Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter by determining the latter to a feeling, to an exertion, or to a Sign, which determination is the Interpretant.” Eco, focusing as he does on Peirce’s earliest

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

theorizations of the sign, paraphrases only the first (“quasimind”) part of that passage – skips entirely over “by determining the latter to a feeling, to an exertion, or to a Sign, which determination is the Interpretant.” This recursive formulation, in which the interpretant is at once something produced in the interpreter “by determining the latter to a feeling” and the determination itself, suggests that the interpretant as “determination” or determining (or guiding) force produces itself in the “Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter.” The transitivity of “that which the Sign produces in the Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter” is therefore a bit misleading. It’s not, in other words, that the sign is an active impersonal producer that creates something in the interpreter as quasimind, though that is how the structuralist Eco seems to understand it; nor is the sign a mere cause (even an Aristotelian efficient cause) of which the interpretant is the mere effect. If anything, in fact, the interpretant is the efficient cause, generated (“produced”) by interpretation or understanding as final cause in the interpreting quasimind, to the end of constructing the sign as formal cause. For Eco the interpretant is “the definition of the representamen (and therefore its intension),” or “another representation which is referred to the same ‘object’” – in other words, nothing so vitalistic as an efficient cause “produced” and wielded by “interpretation” as final cause. “Intension” suggests that Eco is constructing the interpretant as the connotative rather than denotative “definition of the representamen,” and thus as a kind of extratextual reverberation or resonance that is not exhausted or contained by the “definition” as “another representation which is referred to the same ‘object’”; where that intension comes from, however, how it is generated (produced), and how it gets and channels its power to determine the interpreter, Eco doesn’t say. The more obvious late (1907) formulation that Eco misses in “by determining the latter to a feeling, to an exertion, or to a Sign, which determination is the Interpretant,” of course, is the theory of the emotional, energetic, and logical interpretants,6 which effectively solved the manifest problems besetting the notion that Jacques Lacan (1966/2007: 6, 21, 38–39) would later call the signifying chain, or what Eco summarizes here as the hypothesis of the “interpretant as another representation which is referred to the same ‘object’. In other words, in order to establish what the interpretant of a sign is, it is necessary to name it by means of another sign which in turn has another interpretant to be named by another sign and so on.”7 What the sign produces in the “Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter” by “determining” that quasi-mind to a “feeling” (the emotional interpretant), an “exertion” (the energetic interpretant), or another sign (the logical interpretant) is precisely the kind of “third thing” or mysterious X that stands between the sign (say, the source text) and the interpreter (say, the translator en route to producing the translation as another sign) and channels or mediates a regulatory influence from the former through the translator on or to the latter. The interpretant is tied to the sign



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 

in some significant way, through the interpreter’s “immediate” emotional response (the emotional interpretant as First), “dynamic” action or exertion (the energetic interpretant as Second), or “final” formulation of another sign (the logical interpretant as Third); but it also appears to work within “the Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter.” Just what that “quasimind” is remains to be seen. Two pages later, Eco (ibid: 70) exfoliates his understanding of the large conceptual territory covered by Peirce’s term like this: The interpretant can assume different forms: a. It can be the equivalent (or apparently equivalent) sign-vehicle in another semiotic system. For example I can make the drawing of a dog correspond to the word /dog/. b. It can be the index which is directed to a single object, perhaps implying an element of universal quantification (“all objects like this”). c. It can be a scientific (or naïve) definition in terms of the same semiotic system, e.g. /salt/ signifies “sodium chloride”. d. It can be an emotive association which acquires the value of an established connotation: /dog/ signifies “fidelity” (and vice versa). e. It can simply be the translation of the term into another language, or its substitution by a synonym. The idea of the interpretant makes a theory of signification a rigorous science of cultural phenomena, while detaching it from the metaphysics of the referent. These are all, in accordance with Eco’s rough definition of the interpretant as “another representation which is referred to the same ‘object’,” secondary representations that stand in some kind of controlled relation to an object specified in a primary representation; as Eco makes clear in (e), in his model the translation itself might be identified as an interpretant. Venuti does not mention this interesting point in his article; indeed, he defines this “secondary representationality” of a translation in Barthean terms as its “metalinguistic dimension” (ibid: 32), and argues that the relationship between the two orders of signification is “often fixed by what I shall call an interpretant, a pattern of use in a cultural practice that is performed and regulated within a social institution” (ibid). For Eco the translation itself can be an interpretant; for Venuti the translation is a metalanguage (defined in terms identical to Eco’s interpretant) that is governed (or “swayed”) by the interpretant. And while for Eco the interpretant is simply a secondary representation that stands in some significant relation to the primary representation, for Venuti the interpretant is “a pattern of use in a cultural practice that is performed and regulated within a social institution.” I confess to finding Venuti’s revision of Eco’s Peirce quite attractive. My only qualm about his definition of the interpretant is that it is, again, utterly

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

depersonalized. It’s a “pattern of use”: whose use? Who finds the pattern? It is performed and regulated: who performs it? Who regulates it? It’s not even regulated by a social institution: it’s regulated within one, suggesting that there is no regulatory agency, only that somehow the interpretant gets regulated. Given Peirce’s tentative definition of the interpretant as “that which the Sign produces in the Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter,” presumably the interpretant is performed by that interpreting quasimind – but Venuti has carefully airbrushed even that quasimind out of the concept. This depersonalization is, of course, mandated by both structuralism and poststructuralism, and thus by Eco’s and Barthes’s brands of structuralist semiotics as well as by Venuti’s brand of Marxist poststructuralism; like Eco, who touts the interpretant as “mak[ing] a theory of signification a rigorous science of cultural phenomena,” Venuti seems determined here to reduce (or “elevate”) human semiotic activity to a science by downplaying the agentive work done by subjects in it. This is not globally true, in fact. Venuti devotes quite a few pages to the ways in which translating is a performative speech act, and indeed alludes tacitly to the title of Robinson (2003), Performative Linguistics: Speaking and Translating as Doing Things With Words, in noting that “the concept of the performative highlights the peculiar sense in which the translator’s interpretation is an act of creation. Translating is doing ...” (ibid: 35).8 But in his descriptions of translating-as-doing, translators make decisions using the interpretant, which Venuti (ibid: 33) continues to describe in semiotic terms as a largely depersonalized, desocialized, deracinated structure or pattern: “In translating, the interpretant can be formal, such as a concept of equivalence, whether that concept entails that the translation be coextensive with the foreign text or restricted to one or more of its textual features. The translator may decide, for example, to render the foreign text by recreating or imitating closely only one discursive structure.” Here the translator has the power to decide, and specifically the power to decide how to use the equivalence-interpretant; but the interpretant itself is not connected to human agency in any way. It just is. Elsewhere Venuti (ibid: 37) writes of an interpretant in or behind or somehow attached to a French magazine cover from the 1950s as “what enables the ‘presence of the [ideological] signified through the [visual] signifier”’; he says of it that it “simultaneously excludes other possible meanings from the visual signifier, fixes the ideological signified, and naturalizes it, making it seem inevitable.” That striking list of verbs – excludes, fixes, naturalizes, makes – suggests agency of a sort, but specifically a mechanical brand of agency that performs various regulatory actions (including, excluding, fixing, loosening, naturalizing) without intentionality. The agency wielded by the interpretant in this case is in fact reminiscent of the quasipersonified action of ideology – that which is commonly said to naturalize



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 

signifieds and make them seem inevitable – but again Venuti sets up the interpretant as a third thing, neither ideology nor the subject interpellated by ideology but a regulatory force that “enables the ‘presence of the [ideological] signified’” and “fixes the ideological signified.” He also writes (ibid: 39) of a “thematic interpretant [that] can similarly work to canonize the foreign text by inscribing a particular code. This interpretant may include values, beliefs, and representations that enjoy great esteem in the receiving culture, regardless of whether they are relevant to the foreign text. C. K. Scott Moncrieff ’s Proust (1922–1930) and Willa and Edwin Muir’s Kafka (1930–48) contain lexical choices that reflect the translators’ Christian beliefs, consequently revising descriptions in the French and German texts while subtly enabling those texts to gain acceptance in English.” Here “the foreign text” that is canonized seems to signify not the French or German originals but precisely their English translations: it is “foreign,” in other words, in a displaced sense. The “code” that the thematic interpretant inscribes in them or on them is apparently a discursive construct saturated with target-cultural ideology. The thematic interpretant again possesses some sort of quasihuman-cum-quasimechanical agency – it inscribes a code – but has no address. It is free-floating. It just is. Venuti’s formulation also makes one wonder just what a text is, exactly. It seems here to be a container for “descriptions”: a Christian thematic interpretant in the Moncrieff Proust and the Muir Kafka causes the translators to “revise descriptions in the French and German texts.” Where do those descriptions reside, exactly? Surely he isn’t referring to the black marks on the page: the descriptions must be phenomenological constructs that the translator or other reader builds out of (or imposes on) the black marks, guided by various interpretants. What interpretants? Is there one set of thematic interpretants that help the translator construct the descriptions “in” (while reading) the French and German originals, and another set that helps the translator construct descriptions “in” (while writing) the English translation? Or is it the case that there should be different interpretants for reading the source text and writing the target text, but in this case there is only one set, a target-cultural one? Or is Venuti’s brief that there should be only one set total, regulated by the source culture, and thus swaying the translator’s work remotely, as it were, from the foreign country? 2.3 Rethinking the interpretant So what do we know about the interpretant? Peirce (1958/1966: 414) defines it vaguely in a 1909 letter to Lady Welby as “something essentially attaching to anything that acts as a sign”; in an earlier (1904) letter to Lady Welby it is the “effect

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

that would be produced on the mind by the sign after sufficient development of thought” (1931–1958: 8.343); in a 1907 letter to the editor that was rejected by both The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly, it is “something which the sign in its significant function essentially determines in its interpreter” (1998: 409). Eco (1979) exfoliated the different kinds of things that might attach to, or effects that might be produced on or determined in the mind by, “anything that acts as a sign” – an intersemiotic equivalent, an index, a definition, an emotive association, or even a translation – but did not consider how an interpretant might “attach” to a sign, or how a sign might “produce” or “determine” an interpretant. Venuti (ibid: 32), as we’ve seen, adds to the definition of the interpretant the important qualification that it is “a pattern of use in a cultural practice that is performed and regulated within a social institution.” The phrase “a pattern of use in a cultural practice” does not address the issue of how it attaches to signs either; nor does “within a social institution,” really, but the fact that it is “performed” and “regulated” there – in that container – is at least suggestive. Especially the suggestion, to nudge Venuti’s formulation slightly, that social institutions regulate interpretants, and possibly also – another nudge – regulate (“sway”) the way social actors perform them begins to hint at a mapping of the “attachment” of which Peirce wrote: interpretants are attached to signs by social institutions, which regulate their formation, attachment, and use. The Peircean mandate for this “socialized” or “collectivized” understanding of the interpretant is rather sketchily adumbrated in one of the 1907 formulations where Peirce (1931–1958: 5.475–76) maps out the emotional-energetic-logical interpretant triad. First, he says, a sign produces a feeling in us, a feeling that we have a vague sense of what the sign means. This would be the emotional interpretant. Second, the sign prompts us to exert some sort of kinesthetic effort, whether outward (moving our muscles, for example experimentally measuring off a described spatial segment by holding up our hands) or inward (imagining the movement). This is the energetic interpretant. The interesting question for Peirce then arises of the exact nature of the Third into which this First (the feeling) and this Second (the kinesthetic exertion) issue. It would apparently be a thought, so he calls it a logical interpretant; but then it occurs to him (remembering and resolving his early formulation that every sign refers to another sign) that a thought would be a mental sign, which would thus have another logical interpretant, and so on ad infinitum, and that obviously is not the case. We do typically settle on a meaning; the inability to do so, of which much has been made by poststructuralists (through the Lacanian concept of endless semiosis, or the “signifying chain”), is usually considered pathological. In 1907, therefore, Peirce (ibid: 5.476) notes that “the only mental effect that can be so produced and that is not a sign but is of a general application is a habit-change; meaning by a habit-change a modification of a person’s



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 

tendencies toward action, resulting from previous experiences or from previous exertions of his will or acts, or from a complexus of both kinds of cause.” What pragmatically stops semiosis is habit; and habit is organized through an accumulation of experiences in the world and/or of personal choice.9 A furry four-legged creature walks into the room purring, and we know that it is a cat. We do not speculate endlessly on the animal’s identity; poststructuralists to the contrary, our identification of the animal as a cat is not endlessly deferred. We know it is a cat because we have seen this animal and animals like it hundreds of times, thousands of times, and many of those times heard it characterized as a cat. This is pragmatically enough for us. This “fixes” our logical interpretant, stabilizes it, grounds it in “good enough” pragmatic identification. The “sway” of interpretants is channeled through habit – and specifically, as Sperber and Wilson (1986) would want to add, through the habitualized (but always conversationally emerging) phenomenology of relevance.10 Now Peirce here does not explicitly associate habit-change with the collectivizing effects of social institutions; he is willing to leave the field open to purely individual experience, whether inward (the will) or outward (simply seeing the cat, perhaps stroking it, feeding it, etc.). Venuti’s addition of social institutions to the mix reflects the preoccupations of an ideological critic. But it is difficult to imagine the habit that organizes logical interpretants as verbal labels like “cat,” for example, without social institutions. Languages are obviously unified by the groups that speak them; the relative “pragmatic” (habitualized) stability of linguistic meanings is undeniably a product of social institutions; and the social-constructivism that arises out of early-twentieth-century Kantianism – the notion that the “force” that makes us assume that we all construct reality in similar ways is not a God-given mental function like the “understanding” but the unificatory pressures of groups – would extend this linguistic unification to all reality-construction. So while Venuti’s conceptualization of the interpretant as “performed and regulated within” social institutions pushes Peirce a step further than he himself goes, it is a step that now seems to us the inevitable and essential completion of Peirce’s thought. (To refuse to take that step now would seem to implicate the reader in a traditionally objectivist and thus radically anti-Peircean philosophical orientation.) One more step in the same exfoliatory direction might be to understand interpretants as the local habitualized agents of the social institution in the individual – to suggest that the actions of individual actors are guided, swayed, even regulated, by habit through the agency of the interpretant. And if we add to the distancing Foucauldian vocabulary of “social institution” the more explicitly interactive resonances of German hermeneutical translation theory, which as Radegundis Stolze (2003: 11) notes “den deutenden Umgang der Menschen mit ihrer Lebenswelt reflektiert” – “reflects upon people’s interpretive dealings with their

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

Lebenswelt” – we will be even better prepared to explore the precise hermeneutical nature of the habitualized interpretant. What interests me in Frau Stolze’s formulation is not just the nature of people’s Lebenswelt – literally “life’s world,” the world of our interactions with other people and things – but most particularly the nature of people’s interpretive dealings with that world, what she calls “der deutende Umgang der Menschen mit ihrer Lebenswelt.” In German Umgang is our interaction with people and things, what Peirce would call our experiences of dealing with people and things: our sense or feeling both of repeatedly interacting or socializing with other people and of using or “handling” objects (a significant convergence between German Handeln “acting, doing” and Umgang “using, handling”). But it is also more than that: Umgang is also our circle of friends or acquaintances, the company we keep, our associates, which is to say that it is at once felt behavior or the experiencing of experience as our interactive channel to other people and other people as our interactive channel to interpretations (Deutungen) and meanings (Bedeutungen). As Stolze notes earlier in that same paragraph, translation is “ein zielgerichtetes Handeln durch historisch und sozial verwurzelte Individuen” – “a purposeful acting by or through historically and socially rooted individuals,” which is to say that our Umgang mit unsrer Lebenswelt is both our acting (or “handling/ managing things”) purposefully through the people we know and other people’s acting (and so on) purposefully through us. Thus in the case of the Muirs’ Kafka, for example, we might want to say that Kafka’s own writing was swayed by a conglomeration of interpretants formed and habitualized as “attached” to the German and Czech languages and regulated not just by various specific groups or communities or social institutions in Prague in the two decades just before and just after 1900, but by and through his dealings with those groups – most particularly the Jewish middle-class, but more specifically the German schools he attended, Charles-Ferdinand University, the insurance company and other workplaces where he was employed, the Prague Circle of writers he was involved in, the Yiddish theater, his various girlfriends, especially Dora Diamant, with whom he lived in Berlin, and Dr. Hoffmann’s sanatorium near Vienna, where he died. The Muirs’ rewriting of Kafka in English in turn was swayed by a conglomeration of interpretants attached regulatorily to German signs and emerging as habitually persuasive or influential over their work through their dealings with several Lebenswelten, partly in Prague, in fact, where they lived briefly while Kafka was still alive, but also in Dresden, Salzburg, and Vienna, but also, and more formatively, in Scotland and England, where they grew up and lived after their two-year stay in German-speaking countries (1921–1923). Translators – even, arguably, self-translators – will always have had significantly different life experiences than the authors they translate; and my expanded theory of the interpretant would suggest that this means their translations will always be swayed by



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant

the regulatory agents they’ve habitualized through their dealings with and in and through different communities and Lebenswelten. Thinking of the interpretant in this expanded sense can also help us begin to work out a tentative rapprochement between Martindale and Venuti. Venuti, as I say, is very much interested in the singularities of specific texts, and while he does attempt to explain those singularities genetically, or historically, in terms of what caused this or that textual feature to emerge, he is very far from reducing superstructure to base, as Martindale charges. But Venuti’s quickie description of the Muirs’ Kafka does rather reductively suggest that their English versions “contain lexical choices that reflect the translators’ Christian beliefs” – as if the complex differences between the interpretants that guided Kafka’s writing and the interpretants that guided the Muirs’ translating all boiled down to just that one religious difference, that Kafka was Jewish and the Muirs were Christian. At the very least, the notion that interpretants are formed, attached habitually to specific signs, and regulated in use by our dealings with a variety of overlapping communities and social institutions should help us notice far more of the singularities of the Muirs’ Kafka translations that Martindale would want Venuti to appreciate. In order to make this “friendly amendment” to Venuti’s article even more Martindalean, though, we might want to focus more attention on the channeling of social regulation through the habitualization of interpretants, to avoid any implication that social institutions control human behavior in any kind of robotic sense – and thus also the implication that Martindale explicitly addresses, that ideological critics are only interested in the causes, not at all in the effects, or only in the ideological base, not at all in the superstructure. If “social regulation” means robotic control, then writers of all sorts, including translators, lack human agency. They are simply the mechanical instruments or extensions of the only true agents in society, institutions and other ideological apparatuses. The things they write then become interesting not in their own right, not in terms of the rich complexity that might result from individual human agency, but only as the boring and predictable record or register of a having-been-controlled. This dystopian conception of human behavior does seem to be something like the nightmare from which Martindale is attempting to shake us awake, or the “real and present danger in today’s academy” (ibid: 84n) against which he is attempting to warn us. But if we are more careful to explore the habitualized channeling of collective regulatory power through various interpretants to individuals, so that each individual is regulated by multiple interpretants channeling potentially conflicting ideological impulses from multiple overlapping groups, we may begin to forestall the most egregious misunderstandings from the rugged individualists among our (anti-)ideological critics. And if we further add that the collective regulatory power channeled to individuals by or through the agency of the interpretant is a form





Translation and the Problem of Sway

not of control but of sway or guidance – in Wittgenstein’s various senses of guidance, including the kind a landscape may give you as you walk through it, or as walking with a friend might provide, with no overt commands (“go that way!”) or suggestions (“let’s head over in that direction”), simply a high degree of interactive alertness and sensitivity to minute cues from the other person’s body language11 – we may allay the Martindalean fears even more. And if, finally, we take Venuti’s hint and insist that the translator may decide to be swayed in this or that specific way by an interpretant, it is difficult to imagine Martindale or his aestheticist brethren raising much of a squawk at all. If translating is a speech act performed by the individual translator and only swayed by interpretants as the individualized agents of collective regulatory power, which the translator more or less consciously chooses to follow or not to follow, the resulting model of human behavior is rich enough and complex enough, and sufficiently grounded in individual choice, to pass muster as a form of qualified or honorary individualism – qualified, obviously, by insistent pressures from collective regulatory forces. 2.4 The interpretant as an impulse reticulated through the somatic exchange So how are these collective regulatory forces reticulated through a group? How does a group exert “pressure” or “sway” on individuals to behave in certain ways? I want to come at this series of questions in a roundabout way, in terms of an explicitly Derridean argument made by Richard H. Armstrong (2008: 170–71), who argues trenchantly that the case of Homeric epic shows us that there is a complex interaction between translation and the evolving native genre of epic poetry, one where the introduction of Homer in translation stimulates aspirations to that genre. Native products born of such aspiration can then in turn shift the acceptability of the previous translation(s) and necessitate retranslation in order to reshape Homer along the lines of current literary norms. This act of retranslation, then, is itself a realignment of a literary genealogy, a desire to connect the newest literary norms to the numinous source and origin of epic discourse, to reappropriate an authoritative ‘classic’ of the genre under the sign of difference from the previous translation(s) and literary norms. It thus proves to be both deferential and differential at the same time, instantiating a tradition even as it represses specific predecessors.

Armstrong’s complexly recursive Derridean image for the relationality between a text’s past and present – différance – is a useful corrective to the idealized model according to which retranslations offer a series of partial updates or supplements to an unchanging original as main set. If retranslations do not merely update an



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 

original but stir up changes in the target culture that generate a need for an updated conception of the original, then the original is no longer the stable reference point – universal, timeless – against which each generation’s retranslation is measured. Rather, it is set in motion as the reciprocal product of interactive rethinkings in a shifting present. This constitutive reciprocity would seem to me a baseline in the theorization of retranslation. What I want from Armstrong here, however, lies on the other side of the important questions that he does not quite get around to asking. He says that “the introduction of Homer in translation stimulates aspirations to that genre”: what sort of stimulation are we talking about, and what exactly is an aspiration? “Native products born of such aspiration,” he says, “can then in turn shift the acceptability of the previous translation(s) and necessitate retranslation in order to reshape Homer along the lines of current literary norms”: how do “native products ... shift the acceptability of the previous translation(s)”? Where does that shift take place, and how do we recognize that some sort of shift in acceptability has taken place? What sort of reciprocal relationality conditions and structures acceptability both socially and intertextually? And how do social and textual relations interact? What does it mean to “reshape Homer”? Armstrong (ibid: 171) goes on: But even such acts of differential retranslation do not fully control the play of genealogical manoeuvres, since the writer/translator’s act is not the sole locus of culture; there are also others involved in the process of canon-formation and publication who can structure the literary world. An older translation can itself become a ‘classic’ text in its own right, a permanent fixture in the evolving constellation of texts that make up the current literary milieu – or, to use Itamar Even-Zohar’s more formalist terminology, the literary ‘polysystem’. Thus not only is the translational act caught up in the polysystem of the target culture’s synchronic literary world, but also the translational series begins to constitute its own system, variously advanced by authors, critics, booksellers, teachers, librarians, and readers at large.

Again, here, what is a polysystem? Where is it to be found? What constitutes evidence of its existence or functionality? In a footnote Armstrong quotes Mark Shuttleworth’s Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies entry to the effect that a polysystem “is conceived as a heterogeneous, hierarchized conglomerate (or system) of systems which interact to bring about an ongoing, dynamic process of evolution within the polysystem as a whole” (Shuttleworth 1998: 176, quoted in Armstrong 2008: 171n5). But then what is a system? I don’t mean what kind or kinds of system; Shuttleworth (ibid: 176–77) goes on to discuss “the larger sociocultural polysystem, which itself comprises other polysystems besides the literary, such as for example the artistic, the religious or the political,” and back in the

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

eighties and early nineties Even-Zohar and his followers in the DTS and manipulation schools devoted considerable attention to that sort of systems categorization. I mean to ask: in what does a “system” consist? Systems theory coming out of Gregory Bateson (1972/1985) describes the woodcutter, the axe, and the tree as part of the same system: what connects them? What organizes them into a system? What organizes that system as part of larger polysystems like the lumber industry, the construction industry, the tree’s ecosystem and microclimate, and so on? In what way are these sorts of system or polysystem not simply a way of thinking about things as interconnected? When Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1983) retheorize and reimage Bateson’s “system” as a desiring-machine, or as a body-withoutorgans, in what sense are they not merely supplying clever new metaphors for an older and “more formalist” way of thinking? Or again: when Armstrong writes that “an older translation can itself become a ‘classic’ text in its own right, a permanent fixture in the evolving constellation of texts that make up the current literary milieu,” what are the tenors of such metaphors as “fixture,” “constellation,” and “milieu”? A fixture is something fixed or attached so durably to a structure that it comes to be considered part of that structure; a constellation is a set quantity of adjacent stars grouped imagistically by humans projecting pictures onto them; a milieu is etymologically a “middle place” or location organized around a midpoint, like Tennessee around Wallace Stevens’ jar. The “literal” meaning of each metaphorical vehicle is itself a projected way of seeing, a hasty hypostatization of a motivated point of view. Since this sentence is Armstrong’s exfoliation of “the writer/translator’s act is not the sole locus of culture; there are also others involved in the process of canon-formation and publication who can structure the literary world,” presumably the motivated point of view that drives his metaphorical vehicle is collective rather than individual; but what ties or connects many points of view into one, or at least into a loose conglomeration? How do people work together, often without even knowing each other, to “structure the literary world”? The intellectual tradition I draw on to theorize these human “systemic” groupings comes out of Nietzsche’s (1887/1968) ruminations on the civilizing effects of pain on the bodies of Germans over hundreds of years: it is channeled to us through Heidegger (1927/1962) on das Man and Wittgenstein (1953/1984: #19, #23, #241) on the social practices encapsulated by the Lebensform, Foucault (1975/1977) on discipline and Althusser (1971) on interpellation. I’m thinking of Bourdieu’s (1982/1991: 86) conception of habitus or hexis as stored in and channeled through the body, as a “body technique”: It is no coincidence that bourgeois distinction invests the same intention in its relation to language as it invests in its relation to the body. The sense of acceptability



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 

which orients linguistic practices is inscribed in the most deep-rooted of bodily dispositions: it is the whole body which responds by its posture, but also by its inner reactions or, more specifically, the articulatory ones, to the tension of the market. Language is a body technique, and specifically linguistic, especially phonetic, competence is a dimension of bodily hexis in which one’s whole relation to the social world, and one’s whole socially informed relation to the world, are expressed.

Or I’m thinking of Raymond Williams (1977: 132) on “structures of feeling”: We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a “structure”: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. These are often more recognizable at a later stage, when they have been (as often happens) formalized, classified, and in many cases built into institutions and formations. By that time the case is different; a new structure of feeling will usually already have begun to form, in the true social present.

Or I am thinking about what Nancy Armstrong (1990: 69) calls “microtechniques of socialization,” which began as mothers raising their children, survived in those adult children’s heads as their mother’s introjected voice, and was gradually, over a century or two, incorporated into domestic fiction as the narrator’s voice, which was in turn gradually transformed into the esemphonic rhetoric of institutions (ibid): Those of us who have grown up within an institutional culture consequently carry around a voice much like that of a fictional narrator in his or her head. Sensitive to the least sign of disorder – a foul word, a piece of clothing undone, some food sliding off one’s fork, or, worse still, some loss of control over bodily functions – the presence of this voice, now nearly two hundred years old, more surely keeps us in line than fear of the police or the military. For the unofficial forms of power have a terrible advantage over those which are openly and avowedly regulatory. They make us afraid of ourselves. They operate on the supposition that we harbor desires dangerous to the general good. Believing in the presence of a self that is essentially subversive, we keep watch over ourselves – in mirrors, on clocks, on scales, through medical exams, and by means of any number of other such practices. Thus we internalize a state that is founded on the conflict between self and state interests, and we feel perfectly justified in enacting its power – which is, after all, only good for oneself – upon others.



Translation and the Problem of Sway

It should be clear that something like the theorizations I’ve cited from Bourdieu, Williams, and Nancy Armstrong could go a long way toward answering the questions I asked above in my reading of Richard Armstrong: when he says that “the introduction of Homer in translation stimulates aspirations to that genre,” we can imagine both the stimulation and the stimulated aspirations being channeled through the ideosomatic or collective-affective medium by which social regulation is most powerfully because least consciously (most habitually) accomplished. This medium would also make possible the “shift in acceptability,” the “necessitation” of retranslation, and the reshaping of Homer that Armstrong refers to in “Native products born of such aspiration can then in turn shift the acceptability of the previous translation(s) and necessitate retranslation in order to reshape Homer along the lines of current literary norms.” It’s not primarily, in other words, that key people rethink the acceptability of existing translations and start to think about the possibility of a retranslation that will consciously and analytically reshape Homer. That conscious, analytical rethinking may well follow at some point, though as Williams points out it doesn’t always; Peirce too reminds us (1931–1958: 5.475) that the interpretant triad may stop at the emotional or the energetic interpretant, without proceeding to the “cognitive” understanding of the logical interpretant. The primary channel of this “shift” or “drift” is not cognitive but affective, but collectively affective, ideosomatic – channeled massively through the apparent “immediacy” of a group-reticulated emotional interpretant, which seems immediate to us, like direct, unmediated experience, only because it precedes conscious awareness. As Armstrong puts it, “we internalize a state that is founded on the conflict between self and state interests, and we feel perfectly justified in enacting its power – which is, after all, only good for oneself – upon others.” In fact, so justified do we feel in enacting the power of that affective state upon others, it seems strange to us – like a hypothetical analytical construct, without persuasive power – for Armstrong to suggest that the state is “only good for oneself.” Of course it’s good for everyone! It feels universal! The felt universality of that affective state is the key to its success as a channel of social regulation. To readers of The Translator’s Turn this may seem a circuitous route to an old theme: what I called in that book the somatics of translation was essentially an embodied phenomenology of interpretants as individualized agents of collective regulatory power. What I called there “ideosomatics” (Robinson 1991: 10ff) was in fact the felt phenomenology of submission to collective guidance; what I called “idiosomatics” (ibid: 15ff) was the felt phenomenology of deviation from collective guidance, either due to the guiding effects of non-collective or insufficiently collectivized interpretants (random experiences not yet organized by collective regulatory power) or emerging out of resistance to ideosomatic regulation (what I would later come to call “counterideosomatics”). The somatics of translation was



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 

and is a phenomenology in the sense not only of reflecting how the translator experiences the act of translation, but also of emerging out of the philosophical tradition that Edmund Husserl invented and named phenomenology, which was fundamentally a way of directing attention to how it feels to live in the body. Specifically, however, my somatics of translation is and was about the bodybecoming-mind, the emergence of cognition out of affective orientations, so that, say, the interpretants theorized by Peirce, Eco, and Venuti may be imagined as moving from inchoate felt orientations, inclinations, or motivations up through enhanced layers of consciousness to full cognitive awareness. As I noted above, Peirce theorized two different interpretant triads, immediate-dynamic-final and emotional-energetic-logical, without ever quite working out how they interrelate.12 My suggestion was to map each onto the other, so that the inchoate (not-yet-felt) emotional interpretant would become the immediate or First emergent level or phase by which the “Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter” begins to develop an interpretation; the Second or dynamic level or phase, which for Peirce always involved unpredictable interaction with the world of other people and other things, would then be the energetic interpretant, doing something, exerting some effort, which would bring new (but still emerging) clarity to the initial emotional response; and the Third or final level or phase, Peirce’s Hegelian synthesis of the immediate First and dynamic Second, would be a thought as logical interpretant, but most especially the habitualization of certain interpretive “solutions to” or explanations of signs. This model would suggest that for Peirce the interpreter is a “Quasi-mind” in the sense of being not so much a fully conscious subject in complete rational control of his or her interpretive activities as a becoming-conscious body-becoming-mind powerfully swayed by collectivized interpretants, which are channeled through the immediacy of evaluative affect and dynamic kinesthetic exertions as well as through the finalized (habitualized) “logic” of signs. Those interpretants are, obviously, “what the Sign produces in the Quasimind that is the Interpreter,” but specifically what the ideosomatic regulation of signification (which is to say of the use of signs by individuals) causes signs to produce in that quasimind. This model makes it possible to explain, for example, how Christian themes might have emerged in Edwin and Willa Muir’s translation of Kafka without having to assume that they made a conscious decision to put a Christian spin on a Jewish author. They were, rather, guided to that spin at a preconscious level of felt orientation or inclination shaped ideologically through the interpretants that they had internalized – “somatized” – from the groups, institutions, and other collective social formations with which they had interacted over the course of their lives. It is in fact significant, in the light of somatic theory, that the interpretant begins immediately for Peirce as an emotional interpretant, and that one of Eco’s

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

(1979: 70) five types of interpretant was “an emotive association which acquires the value of an established connotation: /dog/ signifies ‘fidelity’ (and vice versa)”: emotive responses and associations are precisely the materials out of which somatic orientations are built, and somatic theory can explain precisely how a passing emotive association “acquires the value of an established connotation.” The fact that the other four types Eco lists – the intersemiotic equivalent, the index, the definition, and the translated or synonymous substitution – are more traditionally cognitive structures is easily accommodated by somatic theory as well. “I can,” Eco writes, “make the drawing of a dog correspond to the word /dog/” (ibid): how? At what level of analytical awareness does that correspondence do its connective work? The cognitive connection may emerge (or “attach” to signs) at any of a number of levels, from the preconscious to the fully conscious; but the more conventional it is, and the more habitualized the actor is to its operation, the deeper, less conscious, more inchoately “felt” or even “not-yet-felt” levels at which it tends to wield its sway over the actor. The “index which is directed to a single object, perhaps implying an element of universal quantification (‘all objects like this’),” is even more clearly dependent on what philosophers call “raw feels,” as becomes quickly evident when one attempts to give a precise definition to the “likeness” that joins a category of objects. Too rigorous an analytical specificity quickly becomes overly restrictive; as Wittgenstein (1953/1984) makes clear, one ends up falling back on a “rough” or “loose” definition of “like,” or saying “whatever feels or seems like this object should be included.” 2.5 Conclusion I am suggesting, then, as a series of “friendly amendments” to Venuti’s conception of the translational interpretant, that: a. the interpretant operates as a habitualized channel of social (collective, ideological) sway to the actor, whether the translator or the translation reader/ critic; b. the interpretant’s sway guides, shapes, directs, organizes, channels individual choice rather than coopting or precluding it entirely; and c. the interpretant sways the individual actor through the three stages of Peirce’s mature interpretant triad, namely the emotional (evaluative affective inclinations and orientations), energetic (kinesthetic exertions), and logical (becoming-cognitive) organizations of sway, remembering always that emotions, exertions, and cognitions are all swayed as in (a) and (b).



Chapter 2.╇ Lawrence Venuti on the interpretant 

In Chapter 3 I want to consider another friendly “Martindalean” amendment to Venuti’s conception of the translational interpretant, namely that aesthetic pleasure is at work in the sway organizing and guiding the choices made by translators (and translation readers/critics) as well. To some extent this amendment is inspired by Venuti’s own invocation of the theoretical work of Roland Barthes, one of whose most famous notions (Barthes 1973/1975) was that texts channel pleasure to readers-as-writers and writers-as-readers. In Barthean terms, should we imagine the pleasure of the interpretants that sway translators and the readers of translations a form of plaisir, a bodily channel of sway from the lisible or “readerly” text to the reader that does not disrupt his or her bodily participation in subjectivity, or of jouissance, a more powerfully disruptive bodily channel of sway from the scriptible or “writerly” text that fractures and frees the reader from her or his subjectivity/subjection? Is it possible that the translator too could conceivably be(come) the kind of jouissant literary trickster as which Barthes imagines the creator of the writerly text, which explodes the reactionary straitjacket into which the reader’s body is fitted by “the work,” that commodification of the literary institution that manages and suppresses heterogeneous impulses? Perhaps not. Certainly Venuti’s conception of the sway of the translational interpretant would not easily accommodate such revolutionary Barthean actionpotentials. By closely following a specific translation history, Alex. Matson’s translations from Finnish to English and from English to Finnish, I propose in Chapter 3 to engage the question of the interpretant-sway of aesthetic pleasure in stereoscopic textual terms that may not expand to the global reach of Barthean jouissance, but will suggest a much broader – specifically, rhetorical – conception of the translational interpretant.

chapter 3

The case of Alex. Matson Jos romaanin tyyli vaikuttaa oudolta, on huolellisesti tarkistettava, ettei outous palvele jotain taiteellista tarkoitusta, ennen kuin väittää, ettei tekijä osaa kirjoittaa. (Matson 1959: 73) If a novel’s style seems strange, one must check carefully whether the strangeness doesn’t serve some artistic purpose before claiming that the author can’t write. (translation DR)13

One of Charles Martindale’s chief accusations against ideologically oriented translation scholars is that it’s all cold theory for them (us), no detailed analyses (let alone celebrations) of specific translations; and while as we saw in Chapter 2 this is strictly speaking not true of Lawrence Venuti, his studies of specific translation histories are often quite brief – limited in the case of the Muirs’ Kafka and Moncrieff ’s Proust to a few lines – and sometimes, as we’ll see in Chapter 5, rather problematically grounded in stereoscopic “comparisons” of translations with an original whose language he cannot read (he devotes five pages of Venuti 2008 to a “study” of two English translations of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, though he has no Russian). In essaying a rapprochement between Venuti and Martindale, therefore, I want specifically to look closely at translations and their originals, in Chapter 5 at those two English translations of Dostoevsky’s Brothers, here in Chapter 3 at a series of translations from Finnish to English and from English to Finnish by the same translator, Alex. Matson. Matson (1888–1972) was a Finnish novelist, critic, scholar, translator, and painter who spent his childhood in England and his adulthood in his native Finland. The important watershed in his professional career was World War II, which actually consisted of three wars for Finland, the Winter War (1939–1940), in which the Soviet Union invaded Finland, the Continuation War (1941–1944), in which Finland joined the Nazis in their invasion of the Soviet Union, and the War in Lapland (1944–1945), in which the Nazis, betrayed by their Finnish cobelligerents – the Finns pulled out of the pact they’d made with Hitler in order to make a separate peace with the USSR – destroyed Lapland. Before the war, his original work consisted primarily of three novels in Finnish: Maata paossa (“Fleeing the Land,” 1920), Knuuttilan turvissa (“Under Knuuttila’s Protection,” 1921), and

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

Lunnaat (“Ransom,” 1938). After the war, he published mostly critical work in Finnish: a New Critical treatise (Romaanitaide “The Art of the Novel,” 1947), a critical study of Steinbeck (1948), a critical study of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (Kaksi mestaria “Two Masters,” 1950), two collections of essays (Muistiinpanoja “Notes,” 1959, and Mielikuvituksen todellisuus: Esseitä ja arvosteluja 1951–1963 “The Reality of Imagination: Essays and Reviews, 1951–1963,” 1969), and the first volume of his memoirs Muistelen “I Reminisce” the year before his death, in 1971. Spanning both periods were two and a half decades (1924–1957) spent translating (before the war) Finnish literature into English and (after the war) mostly English-language literature into Finnish. His prewar translations from the Finnish include short fiction by Aino Kallas (1878–1956), two novels by F. E. Sillanpää (1888–1964, Finland’s only literary Nobel Laureate), and the first great novel written in Finnish, by Aleksis Kivi (penname of Alexis Stenvall, 1834–1872). His postwar translations from English into Finnish include Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, The Wayward Bus, and The Pearl, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Cather’s The Professor’s House, Hersey’s Hiroshima, and Faulkner’s Wild Palms and As I Lay Dying. His career as a translator ended with his one postwar translation into English, a 1957 translation of the controversial World War II novel The Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna (1920–1992), a younger friend of Matson’s and a member of the same Tampere-based literary circle. Matson was so angry at the American publisher for radically abridging and otherwise revising his translation that he refused to allow his name to appear as the book’s translator, and never translated literature again.

3.1 The background 3.1.1 Seven Brothers I want to begin with Matson at what may seem like a tendentious place, the place where Matson is most obviously and indeed infamously at his weakest: his translation of Aleksis Kivi’s 1870 novel Seitsemän veljestä as Seven Brothers (Matson 1929). This is how I first came to know Matson, in fact, in the early 1970s, right around the time of his death at the age of 84: I had heard Finns raving about this novel, about how wonderful it was, and didn’t yet trust my Finnish to read it in the original, so I tried Matson’s translation, then the only existing one (the second was not to appear until Impola 1991) – and was appalled. I obviously hadn’t yet read Venuti’s defenses of foreignizing translation and the use of nonstandard versions of the target language, then still fifteen years in the future, so it seemed to me quite simply that the translation was bad – so overwhelmingly, so painfully, so



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

embarrassingly bad that I found I couldn’t read it. It seemed to me not only stylistically awkward but consistently infelicitous in its choice of word and phrase, with howlers on every page, as if it had been written by a freshman with a thesaurus, and utterly without the kind of “aesthetic free play” or pleasure in sounds, rhythms, images that Martindale celebrates. When I wondered about this to Finnish friends, they told me that Matson was a Finn, not a native speaker of English. What, then, I thought, was he doing trying his hand at this great Finnish literary classic? I will be looking at other translations by Matson as well, conventionally “successful” and even “beautiful” translations – my intent, in other words, is not to blacken his name as a translator – but I do want to start with this one, precisely because the temptation is so great to put its failings down, simplistically, to sheer incompetence, to Matson’s weak foreigner’s ear for the English language. I will also be using Seven Brothers to ask the important Venutian questions about formal interpretants, as well as the pressing Martindalean question that I take Venuti not to be asking: how can interpretants, or the social habits that sway interpretants, be theorized so as to explain what readers phenomenologically take to be failures and successes “within the aesthetic”? Kivi’s novel, as its title suggests, centers around the lives of seven grown brothers, the Jukola boys, who like Huck Finn (and indeed around the same time as Huck, around 1840) aggressively resist being civilized by modernizing Finnish society. In a sense the novel’s action is catalyzed by love: the oldest brother, Juhani, wants to marry the pretty Venla, but the church requires literacy of the bride and groom before it will publish the wedding banns, so all seven brothers, very much against their will, knuckle down to learn to read and write. One week in September everything goes wrong. Venla rejects Juhani’s wedding proposal; then, on the brothers’ way home from her place, a gang of men from a neighboring town make fun of them for having to study reading and writing as adults, and a knock-downdrag-out brawl ensues, which the Jukola boys win, but not without sustaining considerable damage in the process. Two days later the local churchwarden traps them in his office with their primers and, after browbeating them and making them stand in the corner for their thickheadedness, gives them a meal and tells them that after this they will neither eat nor drink until they are able to read and write. They first talk wildly of staging a hunger strike, but then grow tired of that talk and instead break a window and escape. Angry at the church, when they run into a local cupper and fortune-teller on the street and she has told them their miserable fortunes – their house and sauna will burn to the ground and they will live in the forest like hunted animals – they ask her to curse the vicar, the churchwarden, and everyone else they can think of connected with the church. Two days later, on Saturday, part of the fortune-teller’s prophecy comes true: the boys’ sauna burns down.

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

In the passage we’ll be looking at, about 100 pages in – the pivotal plot point that pushes the boys from their youthful wildness onto the path that will eventually lead them to becoming pillars of the community – a local lawman named Mäkelä has arrived to tell the boys that the vicar is insisting that they be put in the stocks, but that by apologizing and mending their ways they can probably placate the vicar and avoid the stocks. Juhani, the oldest, at first tries to tough it out, but as his younger and cooler-headed brothers try to calm him down, he decides to buy time with false promises: Juhani. Hän osoittakoon kärsimystä, ja tahdonpa maksaa hänelle kymmenykset kahdenkertaisesta ja nuoren linnun lihaa ei pidä hänen kupistansa puuttuman lailliseen aikaan. Mäkelä. Eipä auta tässä, luulen minä, rukoukset ja koreat lupaukset, koska muistelen hänen kiivasta ja oikeata vihaansa teitä kohtaan. Juhani. Mitä tahtoo hän sitten meistä ja mitä tahdotte te? Hyvä! Tulkaapas seitsemänkymmenen miehen kanssa, ja verta pitää sittenkin ruiskuaman. Mäkelä. Mutta sanokaat kuinka aiotte käydä käsiin, oppiaksenne aapiaista ja vähääkatkismusta, joka on provastimme tärkein määräys. Juhani. Kokea tässä kotona Männistönmuorin tai hänen tyttärensä Venlan opetusta. Hyvälukijoita naisia molemmat. Mäkelä. Tahdonpa ilmoittaa aikeenne provastille. Mutta oman rauhanne tähden käykäät pyytämään häneltä anteeksi hävytöntä elkeänne. Juhani. Sitä pykälää tahdomme harkita. Mäkelä. Tehkäät niinkuin sanon; ja tietäkäät, ellei hän teissä huomaa vilpitöntä, ahkerata harrastusta, niin jalkapuussa, jalkapuussa istutte koreasti joku sunnuntaipäivä kirkon kivijalan juurella. Sen sanon; ja jääkäät hyvästi! Juhani. Hyvästi, hyvästi! Tuomas. Täyttä päätäkö sinä haastelit hänelle Männistönmuorista ja hänen tyttärestään? Täyttä päätäkö sinä puoleksi melkein lupasit käydä konttimaan provastin edessä? Juhani. Ei ollut siinä merkiksikään täyttä päätä, ja todentekoa ei merkiksikään. Ajan voittamisen tähden poika lörpötteli näin. Männistönmuori tai Venla johdattamaan tässä kirja-tikkuamme! Sitähän jo naurelisivat kaikki Toukolan siatkin. Te kuulitte, meitä uhattiin varmaan jalkapuulla, häpeän hirsipuulla. Tuhannen tulimmaista! eikö ole miehellä valta elää rauhassa ja tahtonsa mukaan omalla kannallansa, koska ei hän seiso kenenkään tiellä, ei loukkaa kenenkään oikeutta? Kuka voi sen kieltää? Mutta sanonpa kerran vielä: papit ja virkamiehet kirjoinensa ja protokollinensa ovat ihmisten häijyt henget. – Oh sinä musta sika! Voi päivää kirottua täällä! Niinpä nyt ylisniskoin meitä kohtaa kovan onnen nuijaukset ja ihmisten kiusanteot, että olen valmis juoksemaan pääni seinään. Oh sinä musta



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

sonni! Venla meille antoi rukkaset; tehneet ovat he meistä myrkyllisen pilkkaveisun; lukkari meitä rääkkäsi kuin pahalainen itse; Toukolan pojat meitä hakkasivat kuin nummea vaan, selkäämme saimme kuin jouluporsaat ja oikeinhan joulupukkeina käyskelemme tässä ykssilmäisinä tonttuina, ryysyt päässä. Mitä vielä? Onhan kotomme nyt ilman köyhän ainoata kestiä, ilman kiukaan kohisevaa löylyä. Tuollahan kytee ja savuaa entisen armaan saunamme aherrus. Ja sittenhän on jäljellä vielä perkeleistä pahin. Hmh! Kymmenellä lävellä irvistelee meitä vastaan kirkonporstuasta jalkatukki. Kirkas tuli! Ellei tämänkaltainen kiusantemppujen rykelmä vie partaveistä miehen kurkkuun, mikä sitten? Oh sinä sarvipää sonni! (Kivi 1870/1984: 101–2) Juhani. Let him be longsuffering towards us and I am willing to pay him his tithes twice over, and the flesh of young game won’t be lacking from his bowl, at lawful times. Mäkelä. Prayers and fine promises won’t help here I’m afraid, when I think of his deep and righteous anger. Juhani. What does he want of us then, and what do you want? Good! Come with seventy men, and blood shall squirt around us even then. Mäkelä. Tell me, what steps do you mean to take to learn your alphabet and the lesser catechism, which is the chief concern of our Vicar. Juhani. Try what the teaching of Mother Pinewood or her daughter can do for us here at home. Good reading women, both of them. Mäkelä. I will tell the Rector of your intention. But for the sake of your own peace go and beg his forgiveness for your insolent deed. Juhani. We will think over that point. Mäkelä. Do as I say; and note that unless he observes in you an honest and strenuous endeavour, you’ll be in the stocks, nicely in the stocks one Sunday, under the church windows. This I say; and now fare ye well! Juhani. Farewell, farewell! Tuomas. Didst thou really mean what thou said’st about Old Mother Pinewood and her daughter? Was it in earnest thou half promised to go and crawl before the Rector. Juhani. There wasn’t a mite of earnest in it, and of truth not a whit. To gain time was what this lad’s prattle was meant for. Mother Pinewood or Venla to guide our reading-sticks! Why, even the Toukola pigs would laugh! You heard, we were threatened with the certain stocks, with the pillory of shame. A thousand flaming goblins! hasn’t a man the right to live his own life as he likes in peace, when he stands in no one’s way, tramples on no one’s rights? Who’ll forbid it? But I say once again: parsons and

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

officials with their books and papers are the evil spirits of mankind. O thou black sow! O cursed day on earth! we’re so knocked head over heels by the blows of hard fate and the cruelty of men, that I could dash my head against a wall. O thou black bull! Venla refused us; they’ve made a nasty, stinging song about us; the parish clerk tortured us like the Evil One himself; the Toukola lads hammered us like senseless earth, we were trounced like Christmas pigs and now strut here like real Christmas brownies, like one-eyes gnomes with rags round our heads. What more? Isn’t our home now without the poor man’s only treat, the roaring steam of the sauna? There the ruins of our sauna smoke and smoulder. And there’s still the worst of devils left. Hrrh! With all its ten holes the stocks grins at us from the church porch. Bright lightning! If such a bunch of worries doesn’t lift a razor to a man, what will? O thou horned bull! (Matson 1929: 102–4) Some of the problems there: “Let him be longsuffering towards us.” Because the Finnish has osoittaa kärsimystä, lit. “show suffering,” Matson renders it “be longsuffering.” But kärsimys here has the archaic meaning of “patience”; “show suffering” just means “be patient.” Obviously “long suffering” and “patience” are related states; and the vicar is in a sense being long-suffering with the Jukola boys. But idiomatically “long suffering” is a state that some third party (say Mäkelä) can ascribe to a patient person; it is not something the cause of the suffering or patience can request. “The flesh of young game.” Nuoren linnun lihaa is literally “the flesh of young fowl,” but presumably Kivi means game birds: pheasant, duck, grouse, quail, squab, and the like. “Young game” would also include mammals like hare, venison, elk, and wild boar. “Didst thou really mean what thou said’st?” Matson systematically uses “you” and “ye” for the formal/plural te and inflected forms, and “thou” and “thee” and “thine” for the singular/informal sinä and inflected forms. He no doubt intended this stratagem to give the English-speaking reader a sense of the difference in Finnish culture between formal and informal address; the problem, though, obviously, is that “thou” doesn’t sound informal in English. It sounds Biblical, and therefore highflown, and by extension formal. “You” doesn’t sound plural or formal, either; it is simply unmarked. In many dialects, too, “you” is specifically singular, with some marked form (“y’all,” “you’se,” “you guys”) as the colloquial plural of choice. (As we’ll see, this was one of the strongest complaints lodged against Matson’s translation early on, by reviewers, and again in the early 1950s, when Jarl Hellemann of Tammi wanted to bring out a revised edition. The “thou’s” and “thee’s” were not edited out until Matson 1929/1973, lightly modernized by Irma Rantavaara.14)



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

“What does he want of us then, and what do you want? Good! Come with seventy men, and blood shall squirt around us even then.” In Kivi’s Finnish this is an awkward and jerky collection of utterances that has to be managed very carefully: Juhani asks an open question (what do you people want from us?), and then suddenly, as if Mäkelä had spat out “We want you in jail,” he shifts into aggressive bravado, promising a bloody fight. The awkward exchange continues, in fact, when Mäkelä seems to ignore Juhani’s challenge completely and says Mutta sanokaat kuinka aiotte käydä käsiin “But tell me how you plan to proceed.” The translator has to read these lines as an actor would, imagining body language: Juhani first saying exasperatedly “What do you people want from us?” and then, anticipating an aggressive response from Mäkelä, getting suddenly tough and throwing out his bloody challenge; then Mäkelä sighing heavily on a protractedly patient “but” and refusing to take the bait. The important emotional shift occurs when Juhani moves from his exasperated question to Hyvä!, which is literally “Good!” – but that’s not what we would say when ramping up our aggressions for a fight. The exclamation Matson is looking for is “Fine!” Sittenkin is literally “then also.” Matson is right to translate it “even then,” I think – but putting it at the end of an “and” clause makes the sentence hard to parse. The thought behind sittenkin is more like “even if ... then”: even if you come after us with seventy men, we won’t come peacefully; blood will be shed. Another matter, of course, is whether the verb in verta pitää sittenkin ruiskuaman, literally “blood shall even then spray,” should really be “squirt.” I think blood might well squirt out of an icepick stab wound, at least in some parts of the body; but the Jukola boys fight with their fists, not icepicks (Irma Rantavaara shifts to “spray” in Matson 1929/1973: 93). And I’m not quite sure what Matson means by “squirt around us,” or why he felt he had to add those two words to Kivi’s Finnish original. Perhaps he’s trying to imply that the Jukola boys won’t get stabbed themselves – that they will be poking icepick holes in the 70 men sent to subdue them, so that the blood will be squirting around them rather than out of them? “(Old) Mother Pinewood.” Beginning with Matson (1929/1952) this became “(Old) Granny Pinewood.” Kivi has Männistö-muori, and muori, while derived from the Swedish for “mother,” does typically refer to an older woman. And in fact the name Männistö does mean “pine woods.” It is, however, unusual to translate a surname in a novel intended for adults; this is normally done only when translating for children, and here it has the unfortunate effect of making Matson’s translation sound childish, an effect that is only accentuated by the 1952 edition’s “Granny.” Any attempt to modernize this title leaves the English translator without recourse; Matson’s archaizing formal interpretant does give him access to the title “Goodwife” or “Goody.” “Honest and strenuous endeavour.” Harrastus is also a hobby, so “endeavour” seems like it might work; and ahkera is industrious, hard-working, so “strenuous”

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

again doesn’t seem far off. But a “strenuous endeavour” in English implies that the project is one they’ve chosen themselves, and that the strenuous exertions it requires are a source of pleasure – as physical labor like burn-clearing a forest or building a house is for the Jukola boys. Kivi means the kind of effort that requires unpleasant work, and the moral dedication to keep doing it despite the temptation to quit. In modern English the phrase might be “if he doesn’t see you making a real effort”; given Matson’s archaizing formal interpretant, though, I suggest the term he’s looking for is “application,” as in “a sincere and industrious application.” “You’ll be in the stocks, nicely in the stocks.” Jalkapuussa istutte koreasti is literally “in the stocks you’ll sit prettily,” with a primary implication of submissiveness (you will be behaving properly or prettily at last), and, I suggest, a secondary implication of speed (you’ll be in the stocks so fast you won’t know what hit you). Finnish parents used to add the phrase koreasti nyt! lit. “prettily now!” when ordering their children to do something the kids didn’t want to do, like clean their rooms, and meant by it something like “obey this instant!” There are subtly ironic British uses of “nicely” that may in some contexts come close to what Kivi’s implying here; this isn’t one of them. “To gain time was what this lad’s prattle was meant for.” Ajan voittamisen tähden poika lörpötteli näin is literally “(in order) to win time the boy babbled thus.” Matson is foreignizing here, but the awkwardness in his phrasing can’t really be laid at the feet of the source-text syntax: the wooden (arrhythmic, anticlimactic) phrase “what X was meant for” is a redundant second unpacking of the single word tähden “due to, because of, in order to,” which is already (and more economically) expressed in Matson’s sentence by the infinitive “to gain time.” Matson is driven to the use of “was meant for” by his use of the noun form of “prattle” for lörpötteli, a verb in the past tense; a closer and marginally less awkward foreignism would have been “to gain time this lad prattled thus.” “We were threatened with the certain stocks.” Meitä uhattiin varmaan jalkapuulla in modern Finnish would be literally “we were threatened probably with the stocks”; Matson’s “we were threatened with the certain stocks” in modern Finnish would be meitä uhattiin varmalla jalkapuulla. Even if Kivi’s Finnish is read to imply the certainty of the vicar’s stocks-threat, though, “the certain stocks” is neither idiomatic English nor a reasonable approximation of the Finnish syntax (an archaic equivalent might be “we were threatened to a surety with the stocks”). “Who’ll forbid it?” Kuka voi sen kieltää? is literally either “who can forbid it” if “it” is freedom or “who can deny it” if “it” is Juhani’s statement about freedom. Matson interprets it the former way; the latter seems more likely to me. “The parish clerk” (“the hymnleader” in Matson 1929/1952, “the churchwarden” in Matson 1929/1973). The now-outdated term lukkari derives from the Swedish klockare, referring to one of this person’s duties – ringing the church bells



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

– but it was in fact an extremely diverse job, including caring for church property, taking the collection, and digging graves (those jobs performed by the sexton in English, later the suntio and nowadays seurakuntamestari “parish master” in Finnish), playing the organ (urkuri or organist) and leading hymns and chants in worship services (kanttori or cantor), and, as we see here, teaching basic literacy and Sunday School classes. There is no one term that covers all these duties in English; but the clerical duties performed by the parish clerk in Matson 1929 and the leading of hymns in Matson 1929/1952 would both seem to be irrelevant to the task crucial to Kivi’s plot, namely teaching parishioners to read and write. Impola (1991) uses “sexton,” but sextons don’t teach literacy either. Irma Rantavaara’s use of churchwarden in Matson 1929/1973 is excellent, in fact: like the lukkari, the (Anglican) churchwarden does the sexton’s job but also liaises between the clergy and the laity, in which capacity s/he would be responsible for spiritual counseling, helping parishioners apply the church’s teachings to practical living, and possibly also – given a culture with a significant number of illiterate parishioners – instruction in reading and writing. The only job performed by the old lukkari that is not performed by a churchwarden is playing the organ in church services. In the Finnish Lutheran church, especially in the countryside, especially before about the mid-twentieth century, the vicar tended to be so much more educated than the ordinary villagers, and perceived as so much closer to God, as to be unapproachable; the lukkari or kanttori was the church official who stood socially closest to the townspeople. In Kivi’s greatest play, Heath Cobblers (see Robinson 1993), the church is represented exclusively by this person, called there a cantor. “The Toukola lads hammered us like senseless earth.” Kuin nummea vaan is literally “like heath only,” more loosely “as if we were nothing but the heath/dirt.” Matson adds “senseless” as what seems to me a not entirely necessary intensifier; and the mixed metaphor in “hammered us like senseless earth” is a bit unfortunate, perhaps. “We were trounced like Christmas pigs.” Saarimaa (1919/1964: 33) reports that in the Finnish countryside in those days, anyone who went visiting on Christmas Day was referred to as a jouluporsas “Christmas pig,” and could be spanked by the hosts. Since this custom is unlikely to exist in the culture of Kivi’s English readers, who are in fact much more likely to eat Christmas pigs, in which case “trouncing” might be taken to refer to the tenderizing of the pork before cooking, Kivi’s phrasing here poses a serious problem for the translator. Kivi actually has selkään saimme “we got it in the back,” a phrase used to mean both getting spanked and getting beaten up in a fight; given that Christmas Day visitors were most likely spanked playfully rather than trounced, “spanked” might be a better verb here (especially since the Jukola boys won the fight). It may be, though, that Matson in London didn’t have access to the 1919 first edition of Saarimaa’s book.

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

Matson’s solution to the Christmas pig realium seems no worse to me than any other; but it is still ambiguous. “Now strut here like real Christmas brownies, like one-eyed gnomes with rags round our heads.” Kivi has oikeinhan joulupukkeina käyskelemme tässä ykssilmäiÂ� sinä tonttuina, ryysyt päässä, literally “rightly as Yule goats (Saint Nicks) we walk about here as one-eyed elves, rags on head.” Until American Christmas marketing fairly recently began to dominate Finnish Christmas culture, the Finnish “Christmas goat” or Saint Nick was a beggar dressed in rags – hence the aptness of Juhani’s collective self-description, since the boys are dirty and their clothes are torn, from the bad day they’ve had. Given that the British Father Christmas and the American Santa Claus aren’t beggars in rags, Matson must have decided to make him/them “brownies” – perhaps because Kivi also has Juhani call himself and his brothers elves, later in the sentence, and Santa Claus is supposedly a “right jolly old elf ” (and “brownie” is perhaps more archaic-sounding than “elf ”). But of course there is a significant difference between Santa Claus/Father Christmas/ Saint Nick and the elves that work for him: I would read that line as Juhani modifying his image slightly over the course of that phrase, starting with Saint Nick and shifting to “one-eyed elves.” Matson also gives us “strut” for käyskelemme, though in English we don’t “strut” when we’ve been beaten up and our clothes are in tatters (käyskelemme is just “walk about,” but here, given the boys’ multiple humiliations, it could be “slink about”), and “real” for oikeinhan, though “like real Christmas brownies” would actually be oikeinahan joulupukkeina, suggesting that Matson misread the Finnish – that his eye added an extra a to oikeinhan, which means something like “truly” here. “The roaring steam of the sauna.” Ilman kiukaan kohisevaa löylyä is literally “without the sauna stove’s rushing/hissing/sizzling steam.” Dropping the stove from the sentence, as Matson does, involves a metonymic shift that is entirely defensible; but “roaring” seems a bit strange for the hissing or sizzling sound of the sauna steam. “If such a bunch of worries doesn’t lift a razor to a man.” Ellei tämänkaltainen kiusantemppujen rykelmä vie partaveistä miehen kurkkuun is literally “If this sort of cluster of chicaneries doesn’t take/bring a razor to a man’s throat.” It’s hard to guess why Matson omitted the throat; that would appear to be the key word in the entire line (Irma Rantavaara restored it in Matson 1929/1973: 94). And “worries” is a bland and rather misleading translation of kiusantemput, which contains both kiusa “vexation, aggravation, bother, mischief ” and temppu “trick, stunt.” So: part of the problem, clearly, is that Matson sticks very close to the original syntax – he doesn’t exactly translate literally, but he does foreignize. Given Venuti’s influential support for the formal interpretant of foreignism, though, we might want to say that the more significant part of the problem is that Matson doesn’t



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson

quite seem to know how to foreignize. Foreignization is distinguished from incompetent translation by stylization: in a sense the foreignized translation is a stylized “weak” or “bad” translation, one that courts condemnation as incompetent but does so deliberately, expertly, signaling to the reader over the author’s head that these are stylistic effects, not translator failures. Matson’s Seven Brothers feels more like the translator’s failure than like a deliberate stylistic experiment. All this can be put down to the fact that Matson was not a native speaker of English. What, though, are we to make of his errors with his native Finnish? Generalizing “game birds” as “game” is a fairly minor lapsus. His choice of the adjectival “certain” for the adverbial varmaan “probably, certainly” in “We were threatened with the certain stocks” may be put down to the fact that the meaning of the Finnish word seems to have changed since Kivi wrote, from “certainly” to “probably.” Reading Kuka voi sen kieltää? as “Who’ll forbid it?” may be defensible – the Finnish sentence is potentially polysemous – but the “forbid” reading would work better with Kuka sen kieltää? or Kuka sen menee kieltämään?, and the educated Finns I have asked about this case have regarded Matson’s translation as based on an unlikely reading of the text. Seeing oikeinhan as oikeinahan is the sort of visual misconstruction that happens to all translators – and though of course a competent translator will usually catch these in editing, anyone who has been translating for a while (and I speak from rueful personal experience) can recall more than a single time when one of these slipped through the editing sieve and got into print. Omitting the “throat” in “lift a razor to a man” may be another careless error; and Matson’s use of “worries” for kiusantemput might also be put down to his inability to think of a good English equivalent like “chicaneries.” This is quite a few misreadings of Kivi’s Finnish in a fairly short passage, far more than one would expect from a native speaker of Finnish who was renowned in his day for his accuracy. There are also any number of spots where Matson worried, as he tells us in an article a few years later (Matson 1934: 10), that Kivi puts words in his seven brothers’ mouths that illiterate peasants would not have used: “The brothers’ vocabulary is also broader than the equivalent class would have used, at least in Anglo-Saxon countries, so that the translator must often choose whether to leave some brilliant item out of a spoken line or whether he dares to let the speaker appear unnaturally educated.” Accordingly, in our long passage above he translates Sitä pykälää tahdomme harkita “that article/clause we will/want to consider” as “We will think over that point”15; papit ja virkamiehet kirjoinensa ja protokollinensa “parsons and officials with their books and protocols” as “parsons and officials with their books and papers,” apparently again believing that Juhani wouldn’t use a fancy word like “protocols”; and myrkyllisen pilkkaveisun “a poisonous lampoon” as “a nasty, stinging song,” again apparently looking for a less specialized term than “lampoon.” For a translator who

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

Translation and the Problem of Sway

fervently and adoringly believed, or at least repeatedly proclaimed, that Kivi was a consummate artist with an unerring instinct for the right word or phrase, this sort of second-guessing is a bit odd. It is, as a well-read and attentive literary critic like Matson must have known, quite common for realistic writers, in English as well as in Finnish – indeed even for Hemingway, the international poster child for resistance to this tendency – to ramp up the literary intensity of dialogue or first-person narration in apparent disregard for their own realism, for what a character or a characterized narrator would actually be likely to say. And in fact Matson himself recognizes that Kivi does this throughout the novel, that it is one of the salient features of his style. It was well-known even in the 1920s – it is in Tarkiainen (1915/1950: 388–95), and Matson (1945: 59) confirms that he knows this – that the literary language Kivi created in his plays and novels was less a realistic representation of actual rural Finnish speech in the countryside around Nurmijärvi, 38 km north of Helsinki, where he lived and where (with fictionalized place names) the novel is set, than it was Kivi filtering his reading in Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Homer in Swedish translation and Holberg in Danish through his own powerfully idiosyncratic sense of rhythm, euphony, drama, and humor. In the above passages – “point” for “article,” “papers” for “protocols,” “stinging song” for “lampoon” – Matson has apparently given up his determination to reproduce Kivi’s literary greatness for English readers, and begun fretting instead that those readers will not think Kivi sufficiently accurate in his ethnographic portrayals of folk speech. If in the other problem areas Matson foreignizes badly, in other words, here he arguably naturalizes unnecessarily. I suggest, then, that this is an extreme and therefore useful test case for a study of the habitualized sway of translational interpretants. If our first impressions are accurate, the only sway at work here powers the verbal and other creative habits that incline Matson simultaneously to stick as closely as possible to the original Finnish syntax and at the same time to naturalize Kivi for an English audience; his failure to do both effectively is attributable to the sheer impossibility of the task, perhaps, and at specific junctures to sheer accident as well, his inadequate command of English and passing lapses of attention in his reading of the Finnish. The fact that he eclectically both foreignizes and naturalizes might then be put down to sway; the fact that he foreignizes and naturalizes badly would not be the result of sway. My task in what follows will be to explore the possibility that many or all of those apparent “accidents” are also channels of sway. To that end, let us begin by finding more out about Matson. 3.1.2 The life and work Matson was born in 1888 to Matias Matson, a merchant and sailor, and his wife Judit, nèe Torckel. When Alex. was three the family moved to England, to the port



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

city of Hull, where for the first few years work was scarce and life was hard – Matias the sailor opened a home for sailors – and the malnourished Alex. suffered in childhood from rickets. The family spoke Finnish at home, but obviously the young boy’s working language outside the home, in school and with friends, was English. By 1902 Matias had scraped together enough money to buy a tailor’s shop, and at the age of fourteen Alex. dropped out of school to help his father in the shop. This plan was short-lived, however, as Alex. soon contracted tuberculosis, and spent some time at a sanatorium in Germany before returning to Finland in 1905, at the age of seventeen. His first job there, which he held until 1909, was in an export firm in Viipuri (Vyborg), a Karelian city that the Finns would cede to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1940 in the peace accords ending the Winter War and then retake (and lose again) in the Continuation War they fought alongside the Germans. It was in Viipuri that Matson first conceived the notion of becoming a writer; he began to frequent libraries and bookstores, reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Shaw’s Man and Superman, and socialist literature. He also worked very hard to keep up his English, reading vast quantities of English-language literature. He had taken up drawing and watercolors in the sanatorium, and in the face of his father’s resistance had decided in his late teens to become a painter; now he devoted himself to painting, and even spent some time back in Hull studying art. In his twenties he worked as an interpreter on a ship to Montreal, but then returned to his art and by 1914 was exhibiting it in Helsinki and generally making a living with his brush. During the Finnish Civil War (1917–1918), he taught art in a school. In the early 1920s, however, by his own account he stopped “seeing colors” (Hellemann 1999: 147), and his career as a painter came to a halt. Instead he returned to words: he published his first novel, Maata paossa – the punning title means literally “fleeing the land” but also hints at “in exile,” maanpaossa – in 1920, about his experiences at sea, and designed the book cover himself. His second novel, Knuuttilan turvissa (in Knuuttila’s safe haven, or under Knuuttila’s protection), came out a year later. A year after that, he married Kersti Bergroth (1886–1975), a writer two years his senior; having begun her career writing in Swedish, she soon switched to Finnish and wrote novels, a play, children’s books, essays, and memoirs. For a few years in the 1920s Matson was assigned to the Embassy of Finland in London, where he worked frequently as an interpreter; upon their return to Finland he and Bergroth bought a house on the Karelian Isthmus. The two were separated in 1930. For many years Matson lived in Tampere, the industrial city 180 km north of Helsinki that is known as Finland’s Manchester, where he was one of the leading lights of the so-called Mäkelä Circle, organized by the director of the Tampere Municipal Library, Mikko Mäkelä. Väinö Linna ultimately became the most



Translation and the Problem of Sway

famous member of this circle, which also included the poet and novelist Lauri Viita, the poet Mirkka Rekola, the poet Harri Kaasalainen, and others. Matson began translating Finnish literature into English in the early 1920s, in London, starting with a collection of short stories about Estonia (The White Ship, Matson 1924, selected from several different short story collections) by Aino Kallas, whom he knew personally (though only cordially) in Helsinki before either of them left for London: her husband Oskar Kallas was Estonian Ambassador to London from 1922 to 1934, and in her memoir (Kallas 1945: 140) she reports meeting Matson and his wife at their farewell party before leaving for London in 1922, and Matson offering to translate her short fiction into English. Kallas was an extremely productive and highly regarded writer of short fiction who was also famous for her affairs with other Finnish writers, notably, from 1916 to 1919, with the great poet and translator Eino Leino (1878–1926). Matson continued translating Kallas for two more decades, next turning to two of her Estonian novellas, which he published as Eros the Slayer (Matson 1927), with Brian Rhys as Kallas’s behind-the-scenes editor – Kallas was cautiously critical of Matson’s translations, noting of one that “outright misunderstandings would appear to be few, but it seems to me to some degree wooden” (quoted in Hellemann ibid: 160), and worked very hard with native speakers of English to improve them for publication.16 Matson relied so much more heavily on Rhys in working on the 1928 short novel Sudenmorsian (Kallas 1970: 239–86) as The Wolf ’s Bride (Matson/Rhys 1930) that Rhys was named on the front page as cotranslator. He later translated three other works by Kallas, a collection of two “ballads” entitled Pyhän joen kosto “The Revenge of the Holy River,” the one-act play Bat-Sheba of Saaremaa, and, in the mid1940s, Kallas’s (1945) memoirs, Löytöretkillä Lontoossa “Explorations in London,” but only the play was published, in Eight One-Act Plays of 1934. In between his first two Kallas translations he also translated Kivi’s Seitsemän veljestä as Seven Brothers, which appeared in English in 1929; more of that in a moment. In the 1930s, he translated two novels by F. E. Sillanpää, Nuorena nukkunut (Sillanpää 1931/1932) as Fallen Asleep While Young (Matson 1933/1939; the US edition carries the less literal title The Maid Silja) and Hurskas kurjuus (Sillanpää 1919/1946) as Meek Heritage (Matson 1938) – both before Sillanpää won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the fall of 1939, edging out Hermann Hesse and Johan Huizinga. The Nobel Committee’s choice of Sillanpää that year has generally been regarded later as one of its mistakes, and the British and American publishers were not eager to bring out more works by him even after the award. In 1937 Matson worked again with a cotranslator, Valfrid Hedman, to translate a collection of short stories by Larin-Kyösti (penname of Kyösti Larson, 1873–1948) as Northern Lights. His third novel, Lunnaat (“Ransom”), was published in 1938; his next publication was not released until the end of the war, at which point translations began to



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

appear from English into Finnish at the rate of at least one every year, three of them – by popular writers, Ottwell Binns, Ruth Rewald, and John Hersey – under the pseudonym Aaro Evä. The American and Irish classics Matson translated under his own name in the late 1940s and early 1950s include Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1944), Joyce’s Portrait (1946), Faulkner’s Wild Palms (1947, two years before Faulkner’s 1949 Nobel Prize), Steinbeck’s Wayward Bus (1948) and The Pearl (1949), Cather’s The Professor’s House (1950), and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1952). According to Yrjö Varpio (1971: 29), he was also asked to translate Ulysses in the 1930s, but refused, saying that it would be impossible to translate Joyce’s masterpiece into Finnish without damaging the original work. Ulysses was not translated into Finnish until the early 1960s, and then by the brilliant and controversial poet and translator Pentti Saarikoski (1937–1983) – and, incidentally, not without some damage to the novel. After this longish postwar stint translating English-language literature into Finnish, then, Matson returned to the Finnish-to-English direction; he wrote to Jarl Hellemann at Tammi in 1950 that “the English language is my only chance to make fast easy money. It’s not worth my while to translate into Finnish; translating into English I make three times as much in a day” (quoted in Hellemann ibid:╯147). Here then is another source of sway behind Matson’s Seven Brothers and other translations into English: the pecuniary. His last translation of Finnish literature into English was also his last literary translation of any kind: Väinö Linna’s 1954 war novel Tuntematon sotilas as The Unknown Soldier in 1957. 3.1.3 Translating Seven Brothers In his 1999 memoirs Jarl Hellemann (b. 1920; worked for the Finnish publishing house Tammi as acquisitions editor 1945–1955, assistant CEO 1963–1968, and CEO 1968–1982) tells the story of Matson’s translation of Kivi into English, beginning in July of 1923, when a Finnish enthusiast named Vilho Leikas wrote to Matson in London, suggesting that he translate Kivi’s novel into English. Matson replied enthusiastically, saying “for my part, I consider myself the most suitable person for this task, due to the fact that my life has been divided between Finland and England” (quoted in Hellemann ibid: 149). He told Leikas that he had already had some experience with the project, as a Scottish professor named R. P. Cowl, the press attaché at the Finnish embassy in London, had essayed the translation of a few paragraphs of the novel – without knowing a word of Finnish, or ever having visited Finland, using Per Åke Laurén’s 1919 Swedish translation and a dictionary – and had asked Matson to correct it. Matson had agreed, and had even written to his friend Otto Manninen (1872–1950, the famous poet and translator of Homer, Sophocles, and Euripides from the ancient Greek, Heine from German, Petöfi



Translation and the Problem of Sway

from Hungarian, Ibsen from Danish, and Runeberg from Swedish) in Helsinki, to see whether funding might be obtained from the Fund for the Advancement of Finnish Literature. Before he’d received a reply from Finland, though, he had realized that the work was bootless and given up. In reply to Leikas, then, Matson again suggested that a translation grant be sought from the Fund for the Advancement of Finnish Literature – he wanted a minimum of 50 pounds a month for six months – and sent a translation sample, which, he said, would be very rough; developing an effective style for the novel in English would require protracted study and experimentation. “I’ve always thought,” he added, “that in beginning this project I would first read such works as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and modern Irish writers, whose folk portraits often resemble Kivi” (quoted in Hellemann ibid: 150). Matson was so excited about the project that he immediately began translating on spec, long before funding or a publisher had been secured, and even spoke to an acquisitions editor at Macmillan in London, hoping to drum up interest in publishing the translation there. The Fund for the Advancement of Finnish Literature was not enthusiastic about the project, but when their reader, lecturer Sydney Silverman, pronounced the sample translation Matson sent “tolerably good” and “no doubt competent work,” even though he had numerous reservations – especially that “it reads so obviously like a translation” (quoted in Hekkanen ibid: 103) – they reserved 25,000 Finnmarks for the translation work, with the proviso that the translation be subject to meticulous review before publication. Matson finished his rough translation some time in 1925, and the Fund for the Advancement of Finnish Literature review was completed in October of that year. Now all that was needed was a publisher. After many rejections, the translation finally found a friend in Ernestine Evans, an American journalist and editor at Coward-McCann in New York who later became a close family friend of the Matsons. In December of 1928 Coward-McCann contracted to publish the translation, paying Matson a flat fee of $500, and the book came out the next year. Sales were slow, but the publisher recouped its investment, and Miss Evans reported that the reviews almost without exception “spoke of the translation’s beauty” (quoted in Hellemann ibid: 1955; see also Hekkanen 2010: 103). This last is surprising on two counts: not only have readers since the 1960s considered the translation extraordinarily unbeautiful, but it has always been rare for reviewers to pay much attention to the quality of a translation. Still, this apparent shift in the evaluative reception of Matson’s translation reminds us of Venuti’s remarks on the interpretant-driven “axiological level” of translation: readers are just as strongly guided by cultural interpretants to their evaluations of translations as translators are to the making of them. Matson himself reviewed the reviews of the translation in a 1932 article in Aitta (“Jukolan veljekset Amerikassa,” or “The Jukola Brothers in America”) – but



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

in fact discussed the American reviewers’ comments on the novel only, not on the translation itself (presumably, Hellemann surmises, because nobody said much about it). The Finnish poet and Kivi scholar J. A. Hollo (1885–1967), for two decades professor of pedagogy and didactics at the University of Helsinki and later chancellor of the Institute for Social Studies (and father of the poet and translator Anselm Hollo, b. 1934), later wrote a review of the 1952 Tammi reprint, calling it “the best we’ve seen in this field.” “I know several other translations done into other languages,” Hollo went on, “and it would appear to me as if not one can compare with Matson’s, especially when it comes to strict fidelity to the original text” (quoted in Hellemann ibid: 156). As a Finn himself, Matson certainly understood the Finnish original; and as Yrjö Varpio (1971: 31) notes, “one of the best features of Matson’s translations is their reliability, which extends deep into the subtlest textual nuances.” As we’ve seen, of course, Matson is not always entirely reliable on his Finnish originals; but relatively speaking, based on Hollo’s comparisons around the middle of the last century, he apparently ranked high. That 1952 reprint was undertaken at the behest of Jarl Hellemann at Tammi, who bought the rights to the English translation and published it in three editions (1952, 1959, and 1973), as well as licensing the American-Scandinavian Foundation to bring out a 1500-copy print run in 1962. Hellemann estimates that by the end of the twentieth century only about 20,000 copies of all editions of the translation had been sold – and says that the general consensus in publishing circles was that the greatest obstacle to larger sales was Matson’s deliberate and even tenacious use of an archaic register. Indeed one of the American reviewers of the 1929 edition had complained that Kivi had only been in the ground for just over half a century, but the translation tasted of two centuries ago. Matson was aware of the risks he was running in translating Kivi archaically, but always insisted that an archaic translation was the only possible solution; as he wrote to Hellemann in 1966, in response to Hellemann’s strong urging that Matson remove the “thous” and “thees”: “The brothers live in a medieval world, where the sky is close to the earth, as in the old church paintings – within shouting distance. For this reason its language can’t be modern either, lest style and content conflict. ... I tried at first to translate Seitsemän veljestä into normal language, but the result was the same as if Kivi’s original were to be modernized in Finnish: it lacked Kivi’s special qualities, his rhythm, his general poetic feel. It would make a classic into an ordinary story that the ordinary reader could mistake for a depiction of normal Finnish life” (quoted in Hellemann ibid: 158–59). (Need I mention that this principle is at odds with Matson’s fear that Juhani using legal terms like “clause” or “protocol” will sound unrealistic?) Matson also noted that he had given serious consideration, back in 1923, to calquing the Finnish word sinä “(informal) you” in his translation, rather than using “thou,” but had given up the idea when he realized how cumbersome it made reading.



Translation and the Problem of Sway

Let me translate Hellemann’s (ibid: 159) concluding paragraph in full: Later when we met in Tampere I tried to present counterarguments. To my mind the brothers’ “medieval world” did not necessarily require medieval language; for example in rural corners of Wales people still live in “medieval” conditions, but do not speak like the King James Bible. And it is clear from innumerable English translations of classics, for example of Don Quixote, that archaic English can be written without “thou” and “thy.” But it was years before Matson relented and agreed to Irma Rantavaara’s careful and very subtle modernization, which was not published until 1973, after Alex. Matson’s death.

Hellemann does not mention, here, that syntax and word choice continue to give modernizations of Shakespeare too an archaic feel, though they use the modern unmarked “you” for both formal and informal address. And the fact that Kivi created the Finnish literary language in large part out of a mixture of Swedish translations of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Homer, and the Bible and Ludvig Holberg in the original Danish – in other words, that Kivi’s “special qualities, his rhythm, his general poetic feel” are themselves a product of archaic translation, though of course a radically transformative kind that is not typically named translation, filtered through Kivi’s sense of how rural Finnish people in the mid-nineteenth century lived their lives – suggests that Matson’s instincts were right: a successful Kivi translation does need to be archaic. And indeed Hellemann here partly seems to agree; but I would also concur with Hellemann that archaism can be rhythmic and poetic without having to imitate the King James Bible. Given Kivi’s extraordinarily heavy stylistic and dramatic reliance on Shakespeare, too, it is remarkable to me that none of the principals in this case refer to the possibility of using Shakespeare modernizations as a model. Here, for example, is a modernized-Shakespearean retranslation of the passage: Juhani. Let him but be patient with us and I’ll disme him double, and in season keep his larder provisioned with the flesh of young fowl. Mäkelä. Methinks your pleadings and pretty promises will fall on deaf ears this time, when I recall the wrath, fierce and just, that he harbors toward you. Juhani. What then does he want of us, and what want you? Fine! Come for us with seventy men: blood will still be shed. Mäkelä. Say but how you boys intend to proceed with the learning of your AbseyBook and the Lesser Catechism, which is our vicar’s main requirement. Juhani. We mean to seek, here at home, the instruction of Goody Männistö or her daughter Venla, well-read ladies the both of them. Mäkelä. I’ll relay your intendments to the vicar. But for your own peace of mind, I urge you to go without tarriance and beg his forgiveness for your brazen act.



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

Juhani. We will take that article under advisement. Mäkelä. Do as I say; and know that if he does not find in you a sincere and industrious application, you boys will be sitting pretty in the bilboes, aye, the bilboes some bright Sunday, at the base of the church’s foundation wall. So saying, I bid you farewell. Juhani. Farewell, farewell! Tuomas. Did you speak true about Goody Männistö and her daughter? Did you mean your half-promise to grovel before the vicar? Juhani. Not a minim of meaning! Not a scantling of truth in the whole fable! ‘Twas but to stall for time this boy so babbled. Ask Old Lady Männistö or Venla to be our pedacules? Even the Toukola pigs would laugh! You heard him threaten us flat with the bilboes, with the very gallows of shame. Fiery hell! has not a man the right to live in peace and by his own lights on his own ground, when he stands in no man’s road, tramples no man’s rights? Who can deny that? But I’ll say it one more time: clerics and clerks with their books and their protocols are the baleful spirits of the human race. O you cursed black pig of a day! So frushed are we here by ill hap and human ropery, I could dash my head full against the wall. O you black bull! Venla spurned us; they’ve penned a scurrilous lampoon about us; the churchwarden hounded us like the devil himself; the Toukola boys pashed us like the very dirt, spanked us like Christmas pigs, and here we slink now like bedraggled Saint Nicks, one-eyed elves with our sconces in rags. What next? Our home stands deprived of the poor man’s one comfort, the rushling steam of the sauna stove. Right out there in the yard smokes and smolders the ruin of our beloved sauna. And then the worst devil of all. Brr! The bilboes with their ten holes smirk at us from the church entranceway. Blood and thunder! If a clutch of calamities this cruel won’t put a man’s razor to his throat, what will? O you forked devil of a day! Then again, my agreement with Matson and Hellemann on the importance of archaism in Kivi translation (along with my belief that a modernized Shakespearean style is the most effective model for it) is just an opinion – one that Richard A. Impola (1991: 83–85) would clearly reject: Juhani: Let him show patience. I’ll pay him double titles, and he’ll always have young game birds on his table in season. Mäkelä: I don’t think prayers and promises will do you any good when I consider his just and burning anger toward you. Juhani: Just what does he want from us then, and what do you want? Even if you came after us with seventy men, blood would flow.

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

Mäkelä: But tell me how you plan to go about learning the alphabet and the Small Catechism, which is the most important order of the provost? Juhani: We’ll try Granny Pine or her daughter Venla’s teaching here at home. Both women are good readers. Mäkelä: I’ll tell the provost of your plans, but for your own peace of mind, you should go and ask him to forgive your shameless behavior. Juhani: We need to consider that point. Mäkelä: Do as I say. I know that if he doesn’t see you hard at work in serious study, one of these Sundays you’ll be perched neatly in the stocks, yes indeed, in the stocks by the church basement. Juhani: Goodbye, goodbye. Tuomas: Did you really mean what you said about Granny Pine and her daughter? Did you really mean your promise to go crawling to the provost? Juhani: Not at all. There wasn’t an ounce of truth in it. I told him that nonsense just to gain time. Granny Pine or Venla holding the pointer for us! Every pig in Toukola would be laughing at that. You heard him threaten us with the stocks, with certain shame. One thousand fiery devils! Can’t a man live by himself in peace and freedom if he meddles with no one, hurts no one’s rights? Who can argue with that? I’ll say it again: preachers and officials with their books and papers are the evil spirits of mankind. O you black pig! O this cursed day! We are so battered by fate and abused by people that I’m ready to run my head against a wall. O you black bull! Venla gave us the gate, they wrote a poisonous ballad about us, the sexton abused us like the devil, the men of Toukola hacked us like clods of earth, we were flayed like Christmas porkers, and now we stand here, heads wrapped in rags like one-eyed goblins, like real Christmas elves. And besides, our home lacks the poor man’s only pleasure, the hissing steam from a sauna stove. The ruins of our dear sauna lie smoldering there and the most devilish thing is still to come. Agh! The stocks across from the church porch leer at us with their ten mouths. Balls of Fire! If a pack of troubles like this won’t make a man put a razor to his throat, what will! O you horned bulls! (83–85) Given that when Ritva Leppihalme (2005) compares Impola’s translation of the first volume of Linna’s Täällä Pohjantähden alla (Linna 1959) as Here Under the North Star (Impola 2001) with the publisher-revised version of Matson’s Unknown Soldier (Anon. 1957), she finds that “Matson” domesticates and Impola foreignizes, it is perhaps a bit surprising to find here that Impola domesticates and Matson mostly foreignizes. Impola’s stylistic model would appear to be the mid-twentiethcentury American realistic novel – giving his target reader precisely the impression that Matson believed would be most disastrous for Kivi’s novel.



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

Still, given Impola’s use of a mostly very different formal interpretant than Matson, it is equally surprising that he has carried over into his own translation several of Matson’s most questionable choices, such as “Granny Pine” (where Matson has “Old Mother Pinewood” or “Old Granny Pinewood”) and “like real Christmas elves” (where Matson has “like real Christmas brownies”). Impola’s calquing translation of provasti “vicar” as “provost,” too, is a bit odd – especially given that in English provosts exist mainly in universities, and Impola spent his professional career teaching in one.17 Let me conclude this section with a quotation from Matson’s long discussion of Seven Brothers in Chapter 4 of Romaanitaide (Matson 1947/1969: 74–75): In Heath Cobblers Kivi’s genius flashes through the gaps in the clouds. Seven Brothers, by contrast, when one views it as form rather than in terms of its superficial density of plot, is perfect both in its internal and its external form. To some extent it has received some positive critical attention abroad, and all it would take would be a chance and timely encounter with a critic with a deep understanding of literature for it to be given its true status in world literature. The fact that this has not yet happened is not to be wondered at, given how it can be critiqued in its own native land. Thinking of that chance encounter, we should reflect on whether we have done everything in our power to put translations of Seven Brothers in a form corresponding to Kivi’s value.

Implicit in this last is a self-accusation: Matson, as the sole English translator of Seven Brothers at the time, has not done enough to give Kivi’s novel an English form worthy of its greatness. His own artistic powers in English, as he all but admits in Matson (1934), were not up to the task. But the second “we” in that sentence – “whether we have done” – also includes the novel’s translators into other languages as well; and the first “we” – “we should reflect” – includes every reader of this passage, including you and me. 3.1.4 Being bilingual Let us also consider some background factors that may help us construct a sense of the interpretants guiding or swaying Matson’s translations. One such would certainly be his problematic bilingualism, which seems to have been both a blessing and a curse to him. Hellemann (ibid: 145–46) writes: During his years as an artist, and later after trading his brush in on a pen, Matson seems to have experienced his half-Englishness as an advantage rather than a burden. He transformed himself into that rare thing in the Finland of the day, a “man of letters,” and all his life he retained a certain English formality in social interaction. His slight foreign accent could almost certainly have been easily fixed, but consciously or unconsciously Matson held onto it, wearing it like his felt hat. He



Translation and the Problem of Sway

pronounced “tunneli” as if it were an English word, with a single “n,” and his “r” was soft in the English manner.

At the same time, however, he seems to have found straddling two languages stressful. Yrjö Varpio, later an eminent scholar (and now retired professor) of Finnish literature, most recently the author of a biography of Väinö Linna (Varpio 2006), wrote his master’s thesis on Matson, based on readings not only of the works but of the correspondence as well, and on extensive interviews with Matson; he found there that “for Matson’s literary work bilingualism meant difficulties, indeed tragedy” (Varpio 1971: 29). After his first three novels Matson found it difficult to continue writing them in Finnish, because “he kept believing he could burrow more deeply into the expressive stores of the Finnish language” (ibid: 29–30), and so could never content himself with anything he produced. When he translated into Finnish he often experienced the same problem: he felt his Finnish was never quite good enough (ibid: 30). This, of course, is a common enough feeling for every translator, even the L2>L1 translator – the language of a well-written source text almost invariably seems far richer and more expressive than the target language, and it is easy to suspect that the relative poverty one seems to find in the target language is not so much in “the language” as it is in or about one’s own inadequacies in it – but for Matson, lacking confidence as he did in both of his languages, it often had a paralyzing effect on his work. Hellemann also recalls that the Finnish translations Matson submitted to him for publication at Tammi were often riddled with grammatical errors: “his childhood schooling in a foreign language dropped little reminders of itself in object errors and uncertainties about noun inflections” (Hellemann ibid: 145; see also Varpio 1971: 30). The Tammi copyeditors fixed them, of course, leaving no trace in the published versions of Matson’s linguistic failings. After the 1947 publication of Romaanitaide, he wrote to Hellemann that he was working on an English version of it, but, he said, “the language keeps throwing stumbling blocks in my path. If only I could concentrate on a single language!” (Hellemann ibid: 148). He never did publish an original work in English (if one does not count the English “Translator’s Foreword” in Matson 1929/1973: 5–10). Hellemann (ibid: 145) says that “as a Finnish and English translator Matson mostly managed to achieve results that show no traces of these struggles, though in the various phases of his life as his work duties shifted he had to move from one language to the other in rapid succession.” It is safe to say at this point that Hellemann’s “mostly” doesn’t cover Seven Brothers, which does ubiquitously show traces of Matson’s struggles with bilingualism. We will see in a moment whether similar traces are evident in other translations he did, in either direction; and will be exploring the extent to which they are traces also of the sway of translational interpretants.



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

In the meantime we can ask, provisionally: what is it about our sense of our own “command” of a language that encourages or discourages us when we translate out of it or into it, or generally read or write in it? Do we have metalinguistic habits driving interpretants arising out of idealized conceptions of “language proficiency” that make us feel inadequate when we fall short, and strong and confident – like a “professional” – when our sense of our own linguistic proficiency more or less matches the ideal? How do we know what counts in the professional community as an “inadequate” or “adequate” or “superior” or “brilliant” command of a language? Are there empirical measurements or tests of our ability, or is our sense of our own “language proficiency” invariably a phenomenology of sway, ideologically shaped and judged? Or again: what are the collectivized habits (and their semiotic interpretants) that structure our speech, clothing, and behavior in ways that make us seem to “belong” to a certain culture or cultures? What pressures does Matson feel to retain a slight English accent in Finnish, to behave socially in a way that others perceive as English, or, in a story Hellemann says Matson told him from the early 1910s, to have an English-style tweed suit made up for his trip to Russia? At a New Year’s Eve reception thrown by the St. Petersburg Artists’ Society, he says, “that suit did not work to my disadvantage, on the contrary. Many guests wanted to make the acquaintance of the young English artist” (quoted in Hellemann ibid: 147). Given that in-group/out-group dynamics tend to discourage behavior that signals fence-straddling between groups, and thus that Matson’s behavior would tend to be perceived as eccentric, even pretentious, by other Finns (and not particularly English by the English), is it realistic to imagine a coherent set of collectivized habits swaying the interpretive emotions, exertions, and metaunderstandings of the “interculture” inhabited by translators and interpreters – or is that merely wishful thinking? 3.1.5 New Critical focus on form As I say, Matson is generally seen as a New Critic, especially in Romaanitaide, which is structured around the question “what is a novel?” (Matson 1947/1969: 9), and specifically what makes a literary text a novel. His recurring answer, that form – not content, and not style – makes a text a novel, is difficult to argue with; but of course it also sets up an ontological hierarchy with highly restrictive pragmatic consequences, namely that it’s not really worth the critic’s attention to study a novel’s “content” (real-world reference) or style. In his review of Väinö Linna’s novel The Unknown Soldier, for example, “Sota ja ihminen” (“War and the Human Being,” Matson 1969b: 176–81), “the war” is only in its dim origins a real-world event that Linna himself fought in; most importantly for Matson as a reader (and translator)



Translation and the Problem of Sway

of the novel, it is a structural element. Noting that the novel depicts “the named soldiers and our Continuation War, whose shape Linna follows so closely that the novel takes its organization from it, its shifting tempos and its limits” (ibid: 179), he goes on to say that war is the greatest tragic play known to us – suggesting that in his critical imagination this focus on dramatic form in Linna’s novel leaches back into the real world, converting war in the world too into dramatic form. At no point in his critical appraisal of the novel does the Continuation War emerge for Matson as the unprovoked war of aggression as which Linna explicitly and repeatedly (and savagely, perhaps even obsessively) criticizes it in the novel.18 There are in fact New Critical impulses on display in all of Matson’s critical writing, orienting him passionately toward the exclusion of anything outside the form of a literary text from critical consideration. Here for example is a passage from the first of his “notes” on literature and art (Matson 1959: 11–12):

The artist must not strive: to express his/her personality; to create beauty; to seek for truth; to depict his/her time; to be the conscience of his/her time; to have an impact on others; to teach.

What then must s/he strive to do? Create works of art. The only real thing s/he can accomplish in the areas I have listed is contained in the work of art, which s/he has created for its own sake. If s/he attempts to achieve any of those aims I mentioned, s/ he doesn’t create art. Art cannot be determined by the will, nor is it born of the will. The rest of that first note is dedicated to further exploration of the autonomy of the artwork: “the painting begins ever more stubbornly to demand that s/he focus her/his attention on it rather than the landscape. If s/he refuses to hear this demand, s/he may finish his/her work only to find s/he has painted a postcard” (ibid: 12–13). And again: the painter should never finish a painting just to have finished it: the painting is in charge, and must not be rushed, or forced in any way. The painting for Matson is very like the source author or source text for the irrationalist translator, the spirit-channeling translator: the source of all sway; the only true source of sway. So far this seems not only New Critical but radically aestheticist. And yet we turn the page, to his second note, and find this (ibid: 15): For making my life worth living I thank art. Art has made life real to me, and made reality concrete. It has expanded and deepened the circle of my experiences. Art



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

has awakened a sense of responsibility in me. It has made me realize that nothing exists in isolation, all is one, every act has its consequences. How, having seen this, could I fail to feel responsible for my works and my future? Art has convinced me of the conditional freedom of the will.

Here is more sway, obviously; but now Matson feels himself being swayed not purely for aesthetic experience, though its circle too has been “expanded and deepened.” Now art sways him also into the realm of morality, of moral causality, of responsibility for his actions, and so gives him a visceral sense of connectedness. If “nothing exists in isolation, all is one,” then the fact that “the only real thing” that the artist can accomplish in the expression of personality, the creation of beauty, the quest for truth, the depiction of the times, and so on is “in” the artwork is not nearly so limiting as it seemed in the first note. If “nothing exists in isolation, all is one,” then the “artwork” is not just a painting or a novel or a symphony but any human action that is guided by art – and that guidance is everywhere, in the making of and the responding to art. Given Matson’s realization that art helped him develop a conscience, a moral sense of consequence and connectedness, it should be clear that he’s not saying that the artist cannot be the conscience of his or her time; it’s only that s/he shouldn’t strive to be. The artist must surrender to the guidance of art – which is to say, to some higher and nobler form of sway that is akin to medieval notions of God, or ancient notions of the Muse. The source of all true creation lies outside the conscious intentionality of the will; it is not Reason but Sway.19 Is the same true of the translator, then? Would Matson consider himself as much an artist, swayed by Art, when he translates as when he writes his original novels? Perhaps not; as he writes (ibid: 27) in a later note: When I read Balzac’s own text [in French], I can see the street, the buildings, the distances, the interior décor, the lighting, all very clearly. In a Finnish translation these things come through sufficiently altered that I do not recognize them as the same. Given that the translation may well prove to be accurate, the difference must be due to the fact that the writer has had as his model – or his pen has been guided by – an image as strong as perception, which is visible through the text. What is visible through the Finnish translation is another text. Do Finnish translations of a novel mislead us, then? That would only be the case if the art of the novel lay in style and depiction. But these are only tools, not art. A good translation, they say, conveys the spirit of the original work. That may be, but the value of translations is that they convey the vision contained in the original form. Vision = seeing things in relation to one another.

This seems to say that the original author is swayed by an image of the world, but the novel’s translator is swayed only by an image of the source text. This is, obviously, what Venuti (2008) identifies as the “metalinguistic” aspect of translation: the fact not only that a translation is defined in relation to another text, but



Translation and the Problem of Sway

that it is primarily a representation of another text. Matson pushes a bit harder than this, in fact, taking the “good” translator to represent or convey not “the text” but “the vision contained in the original form” of that text. But can a translator, swayed only by a metavision of literary form (and not of the world), still experience through translating a moral quickening to the reality of life, to the connectedness and consequentiality of life, to a sense of responsibility for his or her verbal and other actions? Hard as it is to imagine a principled argument against that possibility, Matson seems to foreclose on it, as a connection with life rather than with the vision “contained” in and expressed through literary form. If reading and writing literature is a moral act, an act charged with and swayed by a vision of the interconnectedness of everything, could translation be the utterly depersonalized, and therefore serenely amoral, transfer of formal-textual metavision from one language to another? It’s another matter, of course, whether “good” translators do in fact translate with an eye only to the vision contained in the form of the source text – without, that is, reconstructing in their own imaginations the source author’s vision of the world. I adumbrated this latter method earlier in the chapter, in fact, in suggesting that “the translator has to read these lines as an actor would, imagining body language: Juhani first saying exasperatedly ‘What do you people want from us?’ and then, anticipating an aggressive response from Mäkelä, getting suddenly tough and throwing out his bloody challenge; but Mäkelä sighing heavily on a protractedly patient ‘but’ and refusing to take the bait.” An actor does not learn a role with an eye to the script alone, but feels his or her way through the script to what people do, and how they feel as they’re doing it; and in my experience this is the most effective strategy for translators as well, technical as well as literary.20 True, there’s no way of knowing whether what is thus “transfelt” is precisely the same feeling felt, or moral vision of interconnectedness experienced, by the source author, or, in Nida’s conception of dynamic equivalence, the source reader; indeed we should be suspicious of any claim to be able to summon up exactly what the source author or source reader felt or experienced (even in the self-translator). But regardless of the accuracy of such transfeelings, the phenomenology of feeling or experiencing a vision of the world – of “the street, the buildings, the distances, the interior décor, the lighting,” but also the people, the moods, the projection of affect into natural events (“the mournful soughing of the pines”), and so on – that seems “the same” as what the source author must have felt would seem to me to be intrinsic to the powerful illusion that we call “equivalence.” So what conclusions should we draw from the fact that Matson does not describe the act of translation in these terms? – that he restricts the translator’s phenomenological reconstructions to the vision contained in literary form, and will not allow it to reach out to the world? Should we assume that in translating he



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

did in fact transfeel something like the author’s vision of the world, not just of textual form, but was not aware of doing so? If so, we will expect Matson’s New Criticism to be irrelevant to a study of his translations: his exclusive focus on literary form will show up in his critical work but not in his translations. Or, to run that the other way, we will expect to find Matson concerned with the author’s moral vision of the world, and indeed determined to recreate something like it in his own imagination as a key to an effective transfer. And we will read passages like this, already quoted above, and take them as evidence that Matson did not narrowly restrict himself to his own New Critical strictures while translating: “The brothers live in a medieval world, where the sky is close to the earth, as in the old church paintings – within shouting distance. For this reason its language can’t be modern either, lest style and content conflict. ... I tried at first to translate Seitsemän veljestä into normal language, but the result was the same as if Kivi’s original were to be modernized in Finnish: it lacked Kivi’s special qualities, his rhythm, his general poetic feel. It would make a classic into an ordinary story that the ordinary reader could mistake for a depiction of normal Finnish life” (quoted in Hellemann ibid: 158–59). Or should we assume that as a translator he remained true to the narrower confines he placed around his New Critical theoretical apparatus in applying it to the act of translation, and actively and consciously refrained from transfeeling the author’s moral vision of the world? If so, we may expect to find traces of Matson’s abstract formalism in his translations as well. In fact that same passage about Kivi’s “special qualities, his rhythm, his general poetic feel” might also be read in this light, so that Matson’s determination to preserve those “special qualities” of Kivi’s style becomes a function of his attention to the form of Kivi’s novel, his unwillingness to “make a classic into an ordinary story that the ordinary reader could mistake for a depiction of normal Finnish life.” After all, in Romaanitaide (Matson 1947/1969: 57–58) he insists that Kivi’s style leads us inexorably to an understanding of his form: In order to begin with style we can already note in its use a striving for form that is repeated in the novel’s design and gives it yet another task in the novel’s overall form than the expression of things. A stylistician could undoubtedly derive from Kivi’s use of language a vision of form that governs the whole work. Thus the imagistic precision of the language points to the coherence of the whole. The rhythm of the sentences corresponds to the rhythmic nature manifest in the arrangement of the whole. The shifting tempo of the narrative proves, upon closer study, to be derived less from the quest for the illusion of reality – as is the case in novels whose narration in suspenseful moments takes on a staccato feel, as if holding its breath – than from its basis in form. Even at its most intense we do not hear in it the voice of a narrator engaged in realistic depiction; the narration is constantly creating form.



Translation and the Problem of Sway

In other words, what Matson experiences in Kivi’s style as he translates it is an engagement not with the world – which he is pleased to call here not even moral vision but “the quest for the illusion of reality” – but with novelistic form. If this is the light we decide to cast on our study of Matson’s translations, we will find in Venuti’s new terms only formal interpretants, no thematic interpretants, guiding his work. And if we decide that his translation of Seven Brothers is a failed translation, its failure will have to be laid at the feet of Matson’s inadequate literary powers, his inability to reproduce the rhythms and the shifting narrative tempos of the novel as a formally coherent whole – and not, say, in Matson’s inadequate feel for (or impoverished moral vision of) the rhythms and tempos of human social interaction in English. 3.2 Matson’s translations 3.2.1 From English to Finnish Now let us return to look at Matson’s other translations, beginning with his translations into Finnish, which, given his birth and long residence in Finland, we may expect to reflect a stronger feel for the target language than his Seven Brothers. And indeed this does seem to be the case: translating into Finnish he displays roughly the same level of accuracy as was occasion for praise in his translations from Finnish into English, but in addition he seems to have a knack for recreating something very like his source texts’ styles in Finnish, something like their literary power. What I propose to do here is to narrow the scope of my investigation to three novels only, the three modernist classics that must be considered the most challenging to translate: James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and William Faulkner’s Wild Palms and As I Lay Dying, published in Matson’s Finnish translations in 1946, 1947, and 1952, respectively.21 3.2.1.1 Joyce’s Portrait In Taiteilijan omakuva nuoruuden vuosilta Matson follows Joyce closely, and faithfully, even piously. As Joyce’s narrative voice grows older with Stephen, so too does Matson’s:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. ... His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt. (Joyce 1916/1968: 7; ellipsis in original)



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 



Oli kerran ja oikein hyvä kerta olikin ammuu joka tuli tietä pitkin ja se ammuu joka tuli tietä pitkin tapasi pienen pojan jonka nimi oli nappula ... Isä kertoi hänelle tuon sadun: isä katseli häntä lasin lävitse: isällä oli karvaiset kasvot. Hän itse oli nappula. Tie jota pitkin ammuu tuli oli se missä Betty Byrne asui: häneltä sai ostaa sitruunamakeisia. (Matson 1946: 7)

(Backtranslation:) Was once (one time) and a very good time it was a moocow that came along the road and the moocow that came along the road met a little boy whose name was button ... Father told him that fairy tale: father looked at him through a glass: father had a hairy face. He himself was the button. The road along which the moocow came was the one where Betty Byrne lived: from her one could buy lemon candies.

Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on the college. It would rain for ever, noiselessly. The water would rise inch by inch, covering the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the monuments and the mountain tops. All life would be choked off, noiselessly: birds, men, elephants, pigs, children: noiselessly floating corpses amid the litter of the wreckage of the world. Forty days and forty nights the rain would fall till the waters covered the face of the earth. It might be. Why not? (Joyce ibid: 117)



Sade lankesi kappelin katolle, puutarhaan, opiston rakennuksille. Sade jatkuisi ainaisesti, äänettömästi. Vesi nousisi tuuma tuumalta, se peittäisi nurmikon ja pensaat, peittäisi puut ja talot, peittäisi muistopatsaat ja korkeat vuoret. Kaikki elämä tukehtuisi, äänettömästi: linnut, ihmiset, norsut, porsaat, lapset: hiljaa uiskentelevia ruumiita maailman jäännösten keskellä. Neljäkymmentä päivää ja neljäkymmentä yötä sade jatkuisi, kunnes vedet peittivät maan pinnan. Niin voisi käydä. Miksei kävisi niin? (Matson ibid: 128)



(Backtranslation:) The rain fell on the chapel’s roof, in the garden, on the institute’s buildings. The rain would continue eternally, noiselessly. The water would rise inch by inch, it would cover the lawn and the bushes, would cover the trees and the houses, would cover the monuments and the high mountains. All life would choke, noiselessly: the birds, the people, the elephants, the pigs, the children: quietly swimming bodies in the middle of the remains of the world. Forty days and forty nights the rain would continue, until the waters covered the surface of the earth. It could happen that way. Why couldn’t it happen that way?



Translation and the Problem of Sway

16 April: Away! Away! The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone. Come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth. 26 April: Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. 27 April: Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (Joyce ibid: 252–53) Huhtikuun 16. Pois! pois! Käsivarsien ja äänien taikavoima: maanteiden valkoiset käsivarret, jotka lupaavat kiinteätä syleilyä, ja suurten laivojen korkeat mustat käsivarret kuuta vasten, niiden tarinat kaukaisista maista. Ne ojentautuvat sanoakseen: Olemme yksin – tule. Ja äänet puhuvat samoin: Olemme sinun heimoasi. Ja ilma on sakeana niiden liittolaisia, jotka kutsuvat minua, sukulaistaan, lähtöön valmisÂ� tauvaa, ja räpyttelevät riemuitsevan ja uhmakkaan nuoruutensa siipiä. Huhtikuun 26. Äiti laittaa kuntoon toiseksi parasta pukuani. Hän rukoilee nyt, omien sanojensa mukaan, että oppisin omassa elämässäni ja kaukana kodistani ja ystävistäni, mitä sydän on ja mitä se tuntee. Amen. Olkoon niin. Terve, elämä! Lähden kohtaamaan miljoonatta kertaa kokemuksen todellisuutta ja takomaan sieluni pajassa kansani vielä luomattoman omantunnon. Huhtikuun 27. Muinainen isä, vanha kunnon taiteilija, pysy nyt ja aina tukenani. (Matson 1946: 281) (Backtranslation:) April 16. Away! away! The magical power of arms and voices: the highways’ white arms, which promise a firm embrace, and the great ships’ tall black arms against the moon, their tales of faraway lands. They stretch out to say: We are alone – come. And the voices speak the same: We are your kin. And the air is thick with their confederates, which call me, their relative, preparing to depart, and flap the wings of their exultant and defiant youth. April 26. Mother is laying out my second-best suit. She is praying now, according to her own words, that I would learn in my own life and far from my home and friends, what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Hello/ Hail, life! I leave to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

and to forge in the smithy of my soul the as-yet uncreated conscience of my people. April 27. Ancient father, good old artist, remain now and ever my support. In the first two excerpts, one can do nothing but pick at trivial things. The only noteworthy moment in the excerpt from the first paragraphs of the novel is that Matson has omitted “nicens”: “nicens little boy” becomes pieni poika “little boy.” In the second passage, from Chapter III, Joyce repeats “noiselessly” three times; Matson sticks with äänettömästi “noiselessly” twice but then backs off and retreats to hiljaa “quietly” the third time. Matson also renders “mountain tops” not literally as vuorten huiput but as korkeat vuoret “the high mountains” – a slight metonymic shift from part to whole that would only be considered a problem by the strictest purist. One would have to be a similarly strict purist to take issue with Matson’s omission of “wreckage” from “amid the litter of the wreckage of the world,” in maailman jäännösten keskellä, “in the middle of the remains of the world.” In the third excerpt, from the last page of the novel, we have have more to work with, beginning with a clear error, based apparently on a misunderstanding: Matson seems not to have understood how clothing can be both “new” and “secondhand,” and so has rendered “my new secondhand clothes” as toiseksi paras pukuni “my second-best suit.” Arguable points in that excerpt would include both räpyttelevät riemuitsevan ja uhmakkaan nuoruutensa siipiä for “shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth” (they’re shaking their wings, getting ready to fly, not yet flapping them, and uhmakas “defiant” for “terrible” is an interpretive shift that some might challenge) and kiinteätä syleilyä “firm embrace” for “close embraces” (but a close embrace does involve a pulling-tight that would most likely be experienced as a firmness). A subtler shift might be detected in Matson’s rendition of “the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations” as maanteiden valkoiset käsivarret, jotka lupaavat kiinteätä syleilyä, ja suurten laivojen korkeat mustat käsivarret kuuta vasten, niiden tarinat kaukaisista maista. I mean the addition of a comma after syleilyä: in Joyce’s source text we have a single main item, “the white arms of roads,” which entails two things, a promise and a tale, and the promise is of another two things, “close embraces” and “the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon.” In Matson’s target text we have two main items, the white arms of highways and the black arms of great ships, each entailing a single thing, the highways’ white arms offering a promise of embraces and the ships’ black arms telling tales of faraway lands. It is easy to see why Matson regrouped these items as he did: “white arms” and “black arms” do seem to be parallel images that should arguably stand in syntactic parity, rather than, as Joyce’s English seems to suggest, white arms



Translation and the Problem of Sway

offering the promise of black arms. The net effect of Matson’s shift, though, is to retard Joyce’s narrator’s youthful grandiloquence here at the end of the novel, to give it a subtle sense of bogging down, or perhaps stiffening up. The most famous line in Joyce’s novel, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” suffers somewhat in its transition into Matson’s Finnish: Lähden kohtaamaan miljoonatta kertaa kokemuksen todellisuutta ja takomaan sieluni pajassa kansani vielä luomattoman omantunnon. Every semantic item there is faithfully reproduced, in virtually the same order, and the sentence works grammatically in Finnish; indeed Matson has even worked into the line some small measure of alliteration. But the line has none of the rhythmic power of the original. This is clearly a case where Matson has knowingly – and probably regretfully – sacrificed eloquence to accuracy, and so arguably opted for a foreignizing formal interpretant. Not that the Finnish is in any way awkward, let alone foreign-sounding; it just gives the impression of being a translation, of being subject to constraints that lie beyond the author’s power to choose. The way in which “Old father, old artificer” limps along in Finnish – Muinainen isä, vanha kunnon taiteilija “Ancient father, good old artist” – seems to point us in the opposite direction, sacrificing both accuracy and eloquence to, well, I’m not sure what. Not only is Joyce’s morphological parallelism – “old (...)er, old (...)er” – lost there; muinainen isä and vanha kunnon taiteilija come from two very different registers, muinainen isä from the register of romantic/mythical/ritual solemnity, vanha kunnon taiteilija from the register of back-slapping familiarity. “Artificer” is difficult to render into Finnish, true; but I don’t think plain old taiteilija “artist” is the solution. I might suggest something like Vanha siittäjä, vanha tekijä – using siittäjä “begettor” for “father” and tekijä “maker, doer, author” for “artificer” – and repeating vanha “old.” (Vanha tekijä is also a set collocation suggesting “an old hand” at something.) This at least would be an accurate translation, at least in the sense of sticking closely to the rhetorical structure of Joyce’s peroration; how eloquent it is, though, is not for me to say. 3.2.1.2 Faulkner’s Wild Palms Let us now turn to Matson’s translation of Wild Palms (Faulkner 1939: 183) as Villipalmut (Matson 1947: 220–21), looking closely at a single long Faulknerian sentence from a late “Old Man” section: He remembered that too: that first morning when turning in the sunrise from the rickety platform he saw the hide nailed drying to the wall and stopped dead, looking at it quietly, thinking quietly and soberly, So that’s it. That’s what he does in order to eat and live, knowing it was a hide, a skin, but from what animal, by association, ratiocination or even memory of any picture out of his dead youth, he



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

did not know but knowing that it was the reason, the explanation, for the little lost spider-legged house (which had already begun to die, to rot from the legs upward almost before the roof was nailed on) set in that teeming and myriad desolation, enclosed and lost within the furious embrace of flowing mare earth and stallion sun, divining through pure rapport of kind for kind, hill-billy and bayou-rat, the two one and identical because of the same grudged dispensation and niggard fate of hard and unceasing travail not to gain future security, a balance in the bank or even in a buried soda can for slothful and easy old age, but just permission to endure and endure to buy air to feel and sun to drink for each’s little while, thinking (the convict), Well, anyway I am going to find out what it is sooner than I expected to, and did so, re-entered the house where the woman was just waking in the one sorry built-in straw-filled bunk which the Cajan had surrendered to her, and ate the breakfast (the rice, a semi-liquid mess violent with pepper and mostly fish considerably high, the chicory-thickened coffee) and, shirtless, followed the little scuttling bobbing bright-eyed rotten-toothed man down the crude ladder and into the pirogue. Senkin hän muisti: ensimmäisen aamun, jolloin hän kääntyessään majan aurinkoisella huojuvalla sillalla näki nahan levitettynä seinälle kuivamaan ja pysähtyi, katseli sitä rauhallisesti ja ajatteli rauhallisesti ja vakavasti: Tuossa se onkin. Tuota hän tekee syödäkseen ja elääkseen, tunsi sen nahaksi, vuodaksi, mutta minkä eläimen, sitä ei mikään ajatusyhtymä, arvio tai joskus kuolleessa nuoruudessa nähdyn kuvan muisto hänelle paljastanut, hän tiesi vain varmasti, että siinä oli syy, selitys hämähäkkijalkaisen talon (joka teki jo kuolemaa, ruvettuaan mätänemään jaloista ylöspäin jo ennen kuin viimeinen kattonaula oli lyöty) olemassaoloon tuon kihisevän erämaan keskellä, hauraan majan, joka oli vangittu ja hukkunut maatamman ja aurinko-oriin kiihkeään syleilyyn; hän tajusi sen puhtaasi sielullisen sukulaisuuden perusteella, lajinmukaisen samankaltaisuuden, joka on yhtäläista kaikille metsäläisestä purorottaan, pakottihan kumpaakin sama kitsas ja vastahakoinen kohtalo kovaan ja hellittämättömään työhön, ei vastaisen turvallisuuden saavuttamiseksi, tilin kartuttamiseksi pankkiin tai vaikkapa maahan kaivettuun soodatölkkiin laiskan ja huolettoman vanhuuden varalle, vaan vain saadakseen luvan olla ja kestää, ostaa ilmaa hengittääkseen ja aurinkoa juodakseen, kumpikin lyhyen hetkensä ajan; ja hän ajatteli: No, saanpahan nyt tietää mitä se on pikemmin kuin olin luullut, niin kuin saikin astuttuaan jälleen majaan, missä nainen juuri heräili isännän luovuttamassa vuoteessa, syötyään aamiaisen (riisiä puoleksi juoksevana, pippurin tulistamana ja enimmäkseen koko lailla härskin kalan höystämänä sotkuna, ja juomana sikurilla jatkettua kahvia) ja seurattuaan paidattomana pientä, vilistävää, pomppivaa, kirkassilmäistä, mätähampaista miestä huojuvia tikapuita alas ruuheen. (Backtranslation:) That too he remembered: the first morning, on which he in turning on the shack’s sunny shaky bridge saw the skin spread on a wall to dry and stopped, looked at it calmly and thought calmly and seriously: There it is.

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

That is what he does to eat and to live, recognized it as a skin, a hide, but of what animal, that no thought-association, estimate, or memory of a photo seen some time in his dead youth revealed to him, he only knew for sure that there was the reason, the explanation for the spider-legged house’s (which was already dying, having begun to rot from the legs upwards already before the last roofing nail had been driven) existence in the middle of that seething wilderness, the fragile shack’s, which had been imprisoned and drowned in the passionate embrace of the earth-mare and the sun-stallion; he realized it purely on the basis of spiritual kinship, species-based similarity, which is the same for all from the forest-dweller to the creek-rat, after all the same stingy and reluctant fate forced both into hard and unrelenting labor, not to achieve future security, increasing one’s account at the bank, or even a soda can buried in the earth for a lazy and carefree old age, but rather only in order to be given permission to be and to survive, to buy air to breathe and sun to drink, each for its short moment; and he thought: Well, at least now I’ll know what it is sooner than I’d thought, as indeed he did having stepped again into the shack, where the woman was just waking in the bed the owner had surrendered, having eaten breakfast (rice half runny, made fiery by pepper and seasoned by mostly rotten fish, and coffee stretched with chicory to drink) and having followed shirtless the small, scampering, bouncing, bright-eyed, rottentoothed man down the swaying ladder into the punt.

Given that modernism did not begin to find a foothold in Finnish literature until the late 1950s – and indeed that by the mid-1960s, when Kai Kaila began translating the bulk of Faulkner’s fiction into Finnish, modernist innovations in Finnish fiction had not yet established themselves well enough to make a modernist literary register seem feasible to him22 – it is nothing short of astonishing that Matson adheres as closely as he does to Faulkner’s narrative style here: the single long paratactic sentence, the complexly reflective and associative Faulknerian semisubordinations, the smooth transitions from a close third-person narration to italicized thoughts and back again. Still, our astonishment should give way somewhat when we learn that Matson was an avid modernist in the 1920s, was reading and assimilating Joyce and Faulkner as they published their innovative works, and later was in an excellent position not only to translate them into Finnish but to introduce Finnish readers to them critically as well: “The complexity of Faulkner’s technique,” he writes in Muistiinpanoja (“Notes”), “can be explained by the fact that only by allowing his technique to participate in the manifestation of the image has he been able to say what he wanted to say. He is one of the very few novelists who create as life itself does” (Matson 1959: 64). And, from a few pages later in that same book, the observation I took as my epigraph for this chapter: “If a novel’s style seems strange, one must check carefully whether the strangeness doesn’t serve some artistic purpose before claiming that the author can’t write” (ibid: 73).



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

Despite his receptivity to modernist innovations, however, Matson remains reluctant to surrender entirely to Faulkner’s paratactic syntax. Traditional conceptions of Finnish syntax require more hypotaxis than Faulkner gives us, and Matson seems to feel obliged to provide it as well, at least occasionally. He puts a colon in front of each italicized thought-quotation, for example, where Faulkner is content with a comma; and he helps the Finnish reader parse the long sentence by adding two semicolons in place of Faulkner’s commas. He also escalates syntactic subordination, as when “the explanation, for the little lost spider-legged house ... set in that teeming and myriad desolation, enclosed and lost within the furious embrace of flowing mare earth and stallion sun” becomes selitys hämähäkkijalkaisen talon ... olemassaoloon tuon kihisevän erämaan keskellä, hauraan majan, joka oli vangittu ja hukkunut maatamman ja aurinko-oriin kiihkeään syleilyyn (in my backtranslation “the explanation for the spider-legged house’s ... existence in the middle of that seething wilderness, the fragile shack’s, which had been imprisoned and drowned in the passionate embrace of the earth-mare and the sun-stallion”). Matson there tightens Faulkner’s prose up slightly, there, dropping “little lost,” “and myriad,” and “flowing”; and he gives us a second (slightly paraphrased) iteration of “the ... house’s,” as “the fragile shack’s,” specifically in order to make possible the use of a which-subordination. This structure, required by standard Finnish syntax but optional in colloquial Finnish, was also rendered optional in Finnish literary prose through modernist interventions, but again, not until the early 1960s. Another case of enhanced subordination comes when “and did so, re-entered the house where the woman was just waking in the one sorry built-in strawfilled bunk which the Cajan had surrendered to her” becomes niin kuin saikin astuttuaan jälleen majaan, missä nainen juuri heräili isännän luovuttamassa vuoteessa (in my backtranslation, “as indeed he did having stepped again into the shack, where the woman was just waking in the bed the owner had surrendered”). Again Matson tightens Faulkner’s description, dropping “one sorry built-in strawfilled”; but he also adds a temporal subordination, so that the convict finds out sooner than he expected having stepped (a Finnish temporal infinitive) back into the shack, whereas in Faulkner he “did so, re-entered the house.” In Faulkner the two events, finding out and reentering the house, are sequential in the sentence but not syntactically hierarchical; Matson adds that hierarchy (and continues it later in the sentence as well, with syötyään aamiaisen “having eaten breakfast” and seurattuaan paidattomana “having followed shirtless” where Faulkner has “and, shirtless, followed”). Other syntactic shifts: – “turning in the sunrise from the rickety platform” becomes kääntyessään majan aurinkoisella huojuvalla sillalla, backtranslated “in turning on the shack’s



Translation and the Problem of Sway

sunny shaky bridge” (it is the morning, so the fact that the “bridge” is sunny suggests morning sun, but not necessarily sunrise; and turning from the platform becomes turning on the bridge); – “divining through pure rapport of kind for kind, hill-billy and bayou-rat” becomes hän tajusi sen puhtaasi sielullisen sukulaisuuden perusteella, lajinmukaisen samankaltaisuuden, joka on yhtäläista kaikille metsäläisestä purorottaan, backtranslated “he realized it purely on the basis of spiritual kinship, speciesbased similarity, which is the same for all from the forest-dweller to the creekrat” (Matson doubles “rapport of kind for kind,” apparently believing that his first rendition is not yet enough; and adds another which-subordination, leading to problematic translations of “hill-billy” and “bayou-rat”23); – “thinking (the convict)” becomes hän ajatteli “he thought” (Matson drops Faulkner’s parenthetical identification “the convict” as pragmatically superfluous – the unnamed tall convict is the central character of “Old Man” and thus the default subject of “thinking” – but this is also a signature feature of Faulkner’s prose). I think, though, that a strong argument could be made that all of these syntactic shifts specifically serve the purpose of literariness, the creation of a Finnish text that has the weight and heft and rhythm and depth of great literature. And indeed if one does not compare Matson’s individual Finnish phrasings to their source-text counterparts, one comes away from the translation feeling strongly that one has been reading Faulkner: there is a holistic sense of Faulknerian prose in this translation, a sense that this is how Faulkner would and should sound in Finnish. (Certainly the recursiveness of Matson’s hauraan majan “the fragile shack’s,” while not in Faulkner’s source text at this precise location, is a Faulknerian stylistic signature.) What does this mean in terms of the habitualized interpretants Matson is channeling into his translations into Finnish? I want to hold off on a detailed answer to that question till the appropriate section, below; but let me register three passing observations here. First, my sense is that in translating modernist classics into Finnish Matson is working somewhere between fluency and foreignism – that he is foreignizing more or less fluently, and that to achieve that effect he is here and there deviating slightly from the foreignness of his source texts, giving his Finnish readers the strange and the foreign and the new in a form that somehow also succeeds in feeling natural, feeling familiar. Second, these slight deviations might well be attributed to Matson’s quest for “the vision contained in the original form,” and thus to the sway of his formal interpretant of choice. This line of analysis would begin with the assumption that, following his own literary theory, Matson is less concerned with reproducing the



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

precise literary form of Faulkner’s novel than he is with capturing what he takes to be the vision contained in that form; then, recognizing in a given translation deviations from the surface forms of the source text, it would analyze them as vision-driven; and, finally, it would examine those vision-driven deviations in terms of the sway exerted on Matson by his culture, in this case the target culture, namely mid-century Finnish literary culture, with its strict canons of grammatical acceptability. And third, recognizing that Matson finds a rapprochement between the pull of those canons and the pull of Faulkner’s formal vision, and that his rapprochement can best be depicted phenomenologically in terms of the literary pleasure it provides the reader, I want to ask, provisionally: what sort of sway is it, what sort of reading habit might it be, what sort of habitualized reading-interpretant might it be, that makes a certain text enjoyable to read, or that makes a certain translator strive to make a target text enjoyable to read? Perhaps tacitly influenced by Barthes on the plaisir of the readerly text, Venuti tends to treat pleasure as a “low” or base or decadent response that is easily manipulated by a capitalist society to sweeten the status quo – fluent translated literature as the opiate of the people – but, unlike Barthes, to idealize as its opposite not jouissance but foreignization, the feel of the foreign as medicine that may not taste as sweet but is better for you. Both Barthes’s plaisir/jouissance binary and Venuti’s fluency/foreignization binary would obviously push Matson’s eloquent and enjoyable Finnish translations of Joyce and Faulkner over into the “fluent” camp; the only real difference would lie in the alternative we imagine to that camp: mind-blowing orgasm for the postmodern poststructuralist Barthes, unpleasant work for the Marxist poststructuralist Venuti. But I find this Hobson’s choice inadequate to Matson’s translations. The depersonalized (post)structuralist semiotic that in Venuti would reduce all interpretants to theme and form, I’m going to be suggesting, completely ignores the affective ecoÂ� logies of rhetorical situation, or what J. L. Austin (1962/1975) called doing things to people with words; and the free-wheeling free love of the Lacanian/Barthean jouissant orgasm, attractive as it was to us as a solution to all life’s complexities in the late sixties, doesn’t really seem to offer a critical alternative to plaisir for the analysis of translation. 3.2.1.3 Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying Five years after Villipalmut Matson (1952) published his translation of As I Lay Dying (Faulkner 1930), under the more or less literally translated title Kun tein kuolemaa, once again in Jarl Hellemann’s Yellow Library at Tammi. Somewhat like Wild Palms nine years later, this novel too is experimental in narrative structure but mostly fairly traditional in narrative style(s); and again Matson labors, quite successfully, to reproduce both as accurately and as eloquently as possible in



Translation and the Problem of Sway

Finnish. Since I’m focusing on Joyce and Faulkner as difficult translation tasks that test a translator’s mettle, though, let’s look at one of the least traditional narrative sections in the novel. When the Bundren family is crossing the river and the coffin carrying the body of Addie (Anse’s wife and the children’s mother) slips out of their grasp, and Darl and Cash have to struggle in the water to grab hold of it again, Faulkner gives the boy Vardaman a section written in an experimental narrative style that reflects his age (ten or younger) and his panic that his mother, whom he believes to be a fish, will swim away from them: Cash tried but she fell off and Darl jumped going under he went under and Cash hollering to catch her and I hollering running and hollering and Dewey Dell hollering at me Vardaman you vardaman you vardaman and Vernon passed me because he was seeing her come up and she jumped into the water again and Darl hadn’t caught her yet. (Faulkner 1930: 119) Cash yritti mutta äiti putosi ja Darl hyppäsi ja rupesi painumaan painui veden alle ja Cash huutaa ota äiti kiinni ja minä huudan juoksen ja huudan ja Dewey Dell huutaa minulle Vardaman sinä Vardaman ja Vernon ohitti minut koska oli nähnyt äidin nousevan pinnalle ja äiti sukelsi taas eikä Darl ollut vielä saanut häntä kiinni. (Matson 1952: 152) (Backtranslation:) Cash tried but mother fell and Darl jumped and started sinking sank under the water and Cash shouts grab mother and I shout I run and shout and Dewey Dell shouts at me Vardaman you Vardaman and Vernon passed me because he had seen mother rising to the surface and mother dove again nor had Darl yet caught her.

Again Matson works very hard to reproduce in Finnish both the letter and the spirit of the grammatical form – the panicky run-on style – that Faulkner gives Vardaman here. One paragraph, one sentence, no punctuation marks: at that level Matson tracks Faulkner exactly. Matson does add a single connective ja “and” where Faulkner has none: “Darl jumped going under he went under” becomes Darl hyppäsi ja rupesi painumaan painui veden alle, in my backtranslation “Darl jumped and started sinking sank under water.” He also drops one “you vardaman” and capitalizes the one he leaves in place: “Dewey Dell hollering at me Vardaman you vardaman you vardaman” becomes Dewey Dell huutaa minulle Vardaman sinä Vardaman, backtranslated “Dewey Dell shouts at me Vardaman you Vardaman.” His use of the simple present tense where Faulkner has the continuous present – “hollering” becoming huutaa “shouts” – is perhaps the most significant syntactic shift Matson makes in the passage, especially since Finnish does have an instructive second infinitive (huutaen “shouting”) that might have been used instead. Finnish grammar purists don’t like it to be used like this even in speech, let alone in literary dialogue, which may be why Matson avoided it; still, it is used this way



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

in speech, so that the simple present he uses instead may be considered a slight naturalization of Vardaman’s narrative voice. Matson also nudges Vardaman in a slightly more bookish direction in rendering “because he was seeing her come up” as koska oli nähnyt äidin nousevan pinnalle, “because he had seen mother rising to the surface” in my backtranslation. My guess is that, after Pentti Saarikoski had expanded the colloquial (specifically, the adolescent urban colloquial) repertoire of Finnish literary prose with his controversial translation of Catcher in the Rye (Saarikoski 1961), it might have been possible to translate this line as kun se näki miten se nous pintaan (lit. “when it saw how it rose to the surface,” using “it” for both “he” and “she”, as Finns typically do in colloquial speech).24 This would be a rendering grounded in the kind of colloquial speech a young country boy might use, whereas the participially derived referative oli nähnyt nousevan “had seen rising” follows the standard rules of Finnish grammar, and sounds more like how a professor might talk. Similarly, Matson’s decision to translate Vardaman’s “she” (for the coffin containing his mother) as äiti “mother” seems comfortably premodern; Matson is almost certainly worried that if he uses hän “he/she” for both “he” and “she” we won’t be able to tell when Vardaman is referring to Darl, when to the coffin. (Given the lack of differentiation between “he” and “she” in Finnish, Finnish translators often resort to stratagems like mies “the man” and nainen “the woman” to help the reader keep male and female characters separate, when they are referred to pronominally in the source text.) A modernist (post-Saarikoski) translation might not worry so much about clarity of pronominal reference in an experimental section like this one, where Vardaman’s syntactic confusions reflect his chaotic state of mind anyway. Something like this, maybe: Cash yritti mut se putos ja Darl hyppäs painuen alle se painu veden alle ja Cash huutaen et ota kii ja mä huutaen juosten ja huutaen ja Dewey Dell huutaen mulle et Vardaman sä vardaman sä vardaman ja Vernon ohitti mut kun se näki miten se nous pintaan ja se hyppäs taas veteen ja Darl ei ollut viel saanu kii.

Still, for 1952 in Finland Matson’s translation is strikingly and even radically modernist, following Faulkner’s stylistic innovations both closely and enjoyably, without a trace of the awkwardness that plagued Seven Brothers. The rhythms of Kun tein kuolemaa may not be natural in Finnish, but as a result of Matson’s well-tuned ear they feel natural, and powerful, and pleasurable. “For 1952 in Finland”: it should be obvious that in the translator’s choice of a formal interpretant the spatiotemporal dynamic is crucial. Just as a “fluent” translation will depend for its naturalizing effect on what the target audience at the time is used to, so too will a “foreignizing” translation for its estranging effect. A foreignizing translation has to build just the right tension between the familiar and the strange, the local and the foreign, so as to exert just the right degree and kind



Translation and the Problem of Sway

of formal leverage on readers, to estrange them effectively, to give them a feeling of strangeness or foreignness that pushes them to rethink and refeel things. Too much strangeness too soon will simply be rejected; too little will go unnoticed, and will have no transformative effect. My radically colloquial translation just above would have been dismissed as “bad Finnish” in the 1950s; in the mid-1960s it would have been considered daringly edgy and experimental but at least possible and understandable, thanks to Saarikoski’s Catcher; half a century later it has lost its edginess and become more or less expected. (We will be exploring this spatiotemporal dynamic in Chapter 4.) 3.2.2 From Finnish to English So shall we conclude from a comparison of these three translations into Finnish with Seven Brothers that Matson translated pleasurably, powerfully, with strong literary rhythms into Finnish because that was his first language, and awkwardly, weakly, with a tin ear into English because he only spent eleven or twelve childhood years in England and visited England only sporadically as an adult, and so never had as strong a feel for English as he did for Finnish? 3.2.2.1 Translating Aino Kallas His early translations of Aino Kallas’s short fiction into English would not bear such an invidious comparison out; but then, as we’ve seen, Kallas hired native speakers of English to “improve” what she found to be Matson’s accurate but “wooden” translations of her work: Hän asettui ainaiselle lempipaikalleen, kivipenkille, jonka takana muuria vasten kasvoi kukkivia ruusupensaita. Puistatus kulki läpi hänen ruumiinsa. Häntä vilutti alinomaa, kesälläkin, milloinkaan hän ei saanut kyllikseen aurinkoa. Pohjoi-╉ nen, kylmä ja pimeä maa, oli kuin verikin olisi vaalentunut auringon puutteesta! (Kallas 1970: 321) She settled herself in her favourite spot, a bench of stone, behind which rosebushes in bloom grew against the wall. A shudder passed through her limbs. Always she felt cold, even in summer. For her there could never be too much sun. An arctic, cold and gloomy land, where the blood itself seemed to lose its colour from lack of sunshine. (Matson 1924: 23) Tapahtui sitten, että Priidik, Suuremöisan metsävahti, joka vielä oli nuorimies ja naimaton, lähti yhtenä suvisena huomenena Kassarin saareen lampaita ostamaan, yli sen matalan salmen, kuin eroittaa Kassarin sekä Orjakun saaret Käinasta. Ja sattui sangen tyyni sää, niinkuin kaikki ilman tuulet olisivat Herran sapattia pitäneet, taivas oli rastaan rinnalla, ja maa hengitti hellettänsä, niinkuin palavaisen pätsin suu. (Kallas 1970: 244)



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

Now it befell that Priidik, the forester of Suuremöisa, who was still a young man and unmarried, set forth one morning in summer to buy sheep on the Island of Kassari, which lieth on the other side of the shallow channel dividing the Islands of Kassari and Orjaku from Keina. And it chanced that the weather was very calm, as though all the winds had kept the Lord’s Sabbath, and the sky was flecked like the breast of a thrush, and the earth breathed forth the heat that was in it like the mouth of a fiery furnace. (Matson 1930: 15)

In “The Legend of Young Odele and the Leper,” from which that first excerpt is taken, Kallas does not archaize overtly, and, perhaps with the help of his English editor, Matson finds a very similar register in English. Syntactically speaking one might argue that Matson is naturalizing there: Hän asettui ainaiselle lempipaikalleen, kivipenkille, jonka takana muuria vasten kasvoi kukkivia ruusupensaita is literally “She settled in her always favorite place, on a stone bench, behind which against a wall grew blooming rose bushes,” and if Matson had so chosen, he could have followed that syntax exactly, producing a grammatically correct translation with just a hint of foreignness – a superficial foreignizing mode that would not necessarily have given Matson or us as his readers access to “the vision contained in the original form.” Still, in his discussions of specific foreignizing strategies Venuti tends to idealize nonstandard usages, and this might have been an opportunity to offer one. Matson’s conformity to standard usage in “She settled herself in her favourite spot, a bench of stone, behind which rose-bushes in bloom grew against the wall” might thus convince us to consider this a naturalizing translation. To render pohjoinen “northern” as “arctic,” too, or oli vaalentunut “had paled, had lightened” as “seemed to lose its colour,” is in each case to impose a semantically narrower interpretation that might support an analysis of the passage as opting for a “fluent” formal interpretant. The second passage is lightly but markedly archaized in the Finnish, and again Matson (with Brian Rhys’s help) finds an extremely similar register in English: Kallas uses kuin “as” for joka “which” (“that shallow channel as divides ...”) and a few slightly older and more poetic words and spellings (suvisena, eroittaa, sangen, palavaisen); Matson uses “lieth” and again a few slightly older and more poetic words (“befell,” “chanced”). In one spot Matson unpacks Kallas’s metaphor slightly, into a simile – taivas oli rastaan rinnalla “the sky was thrush-breasted” becomes “the sky was flecked like the breast of a thrush” – which again might arguably be called a naturalizing strategy. Again, however, what Matson and his editors are giving us in the Kallas translations is more like a middle ground between naturalization and foreignization – a fluently naturalized rendition of certain “foreign” elements (especially the archaisms) in the source texts. It would be equally possible, therefore, to argue that the translations succeed as “fluent” renditions or that they succeed as foreignizations. So is the apparent success of these translations of Kallas the result of good editing, by someone other than Matson – by a native speaker of English? If so, the

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

tentative conclusion drawn from a comparison of Matson’s Finnish Joyce and Faulkner and English Kivi, that Matson was a good translator into Finnish and a weak translator into English, might well still stand. 3.2.2.2 Translating F. E. Sillanpää But no one edited his translations of F. E. Sillanpää in the 1930s, and they show virtually none of the weaknesses of his Kivi just a few years before – although, ironically enough, Jarl Hellemann (ibid: 168) writes that “perhaps Sillanpää as a writer did not fully open to Alex. Matson.” Matson loved Kivi’s work, ranked Seven Brothers at the very peak of the Finnish literary canon – indeed somewhere near the peak of the world literary canon – and yet as a translator seemed to have felt far less at home with Kivi than with Sillanpää.25 3.2.2.2.1 Fallen Asleep While Young Here, for example, is a passage from early in Nuorena nukkunut (Sillanpää 1931/1932: 17), which Matson translated as Fallen Asleep While Young (Matson 1933/1939: 15): Hän tunsi itsekin häissä hyvästi virkistyneenä. Poissaolon kartuttama onni oli tallella, se tulvi nyt tajuntaan, ja hän oli paluumatkan lopputaipaleella mitä suloisimpien tunnelmien vallassa. Onni vei yhä myötämaata, mitään raskasta ei tuntunut olevan edessäkään. Ja myötäinen olikin onni, sillä eräässä tien kohdassa tuli muuan akka hyvin luontevasti mökistään tieaidan viereen ja laittautui vielä luontevammin puheisiin Kustaan kanssa. Kustaa sai häneltä kysymättään kuulla yhtä ja toista, kiirekös siinä oli leppoisana iltapuolen hetkenä häistä palatessa. He felt greatly refreshed by the wedding. Happiness, accumulated during absence, had not evaporated; it now flooded his being, and all through the last stage of his return journey he was visited by the most delicious moods. Happiness led him a downhill track; even at a distance no difficulties loomed. His luck was indeed good, for at a bend in the road a woman came artlessly from a cottage by the roadside and even more artlessly entered into conversation with him. Kustaa learned one thing and another from her without any show of curiosity on his part, for what more natural than that he should be in no hurry on his home-coming from a wedding that fine evening.

This is a very close rendition. The only two shifts Matson makes are extremely subtle. The first is in the first sentence: Hän tunsi itsekin häissä hyvästi virkistyneenä, literally “He felt himself too at the wedding well refreshed,” becomes in Matson’s translation “He felt greatly refreshed by the wedding.” Itsekin “himself too” in that sentence is specifically a grammatical hook from the previous paragraph, the last words of which are perillä oli Salmeluksen Kustaa valoisa ja komea häävieras, which Matson (1933/1939: 15) translates “at his destination Kustaa Salmelus was a bright



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

and handsome wedding guest.” In other words, not only did he brighten the wedding with his presence, but he too felt greatly refreshed by being there. Matson discards the hook, giving the transition a degree of inertness that the original lacks. The narrative “joints” of Matson’s translation are just a shade stiffer than in the Finnish. The very next sentence in that passage is Poissaolon kartuttama onni oli tallella, se tulvi nyt tajuntaan, ja hän oli paluumatkan lopputaipaleella mitä suloisimpien tunnelmien vallassa, which is literally “The happiness his absence had accrued was still there, it flooded now into consciousness, and he was at the end of his return journey under the sway of the sweetest moods.” In Matson’s translation that becomes “Happiness, accumulated during absence, had not evaporated; it now flooded his being, and all through the last stage of his return journey he was visited by the most delicious moods.” As usual, here, Matson converts the ubiquitous Finnish comma splice to a semicolon, slowing down the movement of Sillanpää’s prose; and his addition of commas around “accumulated during absence” slows it down even more. If the allegretto tempo of this sentence is read (or felt) as a channel of Kustaa’s happiness, Matson as translator may be taken to be putting a damper on that feeling. In the Finnish, too, Kustaa is “under the sway” or “in the power” of the sweetest moods; in Matson’s translation those moods only “visit” him. Once again we find Matson’s translation almost imperceptibly stiffer than the Finnish original. 3.2.2.2.2 Meek Heritage Or look at Matson’s second Sillanpää translation, Meek Heritage (Matson 1938), his translation of Hurskas kurjuus, Sillanpää’s controversial 1919 novel about the Civil War, which had just concluded when he wrote it. The passage is the very end of the novel, the last paragraph, just after the central character Johan “Juha” Abraham ToiÂ� vola has been executed as a Red, at the bottom of a mass grave – a fate inflicted on over 8000 Reds around the country, by the victorious Whites (one of the great historical traumas that plagued Finnish history throughout most of the twentieth century): Jääkäri menee miehineen jo tuolla etäällä pois hautausmaalta. Johan Abrahamin elämäkerta on ehtinyt luonnolliseen loppukohtaansa, puuttuu vain tavanomaiset loppusanat. Niiksi on vaikea mitään painavampaa keksiä, sillä vanhan Juhan loppu sattui myrskyn ollessa parhaimmillaan Suomessa ja muunkin ihmiskunnan vielä kiihkeästi yrittäessä arvata, mikä se onni on, jota se näin vaikeasti tavoittelee. Ken olisi kaukonäkijä, voisi ehkä jotain nähdä, jos tänä himmeänä yönä hiipisi hautausmaalle, laskeutuisi hautaan verilammikon ja ruumiskasan lähelle ja siitä käsin kuuntelisi hiljaisuutta. Ei ole sanottu, että voimakkain tunne tällöin olisi kauhu. Kevät aavisteleiksen jo hautausman puissa ja ilmassa, se lupaa jälleen linnunlaulua ja kukkain tuoksua ja varttuville ihmislapsille ilonkylläisiä päiviä. Yhä lähemmäksi he pääsevät sitä onnea, jonka nimeä he turhaan ovat vuosisadasta toiseen aprikoineet. Tänä päivänä he vielä luulevat, että lihallinen ruumis tarpeineen,

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

yhteiskunta ja muut semmoiset ovat kaikkein läheisimmässä tekemisessä tuon onnen kanssa. Mutta vaikka asiat vielä ovatkin niin karkealla kannalla, tapauksessa ollaan, että useimmat yksilöt kuolinhetkellään sen onnen vilaukselta kokevat; sehän juuri antaa öiselle hautausmaalle semmoisen yhtenäisen tunnelman, kun me sen seikan aavistamme. Ja kyllä se joskus, ihmiskunnan elinpäivän jatkuessa, vielä leviää elävienkin valtakuntaan. (Sillanpää 1919/1946: 236–37) The officer and his men already march far away from the graveyard. The life of Johan Toivola has reached its natural end; there remains only the usual valediction. But it is hard to find anything weighty enough for that purpose, for Juha met his death while the storm raged over Finland at its worst and the rest of mankind was still passionately trying to guess what the happiness was that it was straining with so much labor to achieve. Were one gifted with second sight, one might perhaps learn something if on this dim night one were to steal to the graveyard, descend into the grave beside the pool of blood and the pile of corpses, and there listen to the silence. It is by no means certain that one’s dominating sensation would be horror. Spring hovers already in the graveyard trees and in the air, promising once again bird-song and the scent of flowers and to the growing generation days full of bliss. Ever nearer they advance towards that happiness, the definition of which has occupied mankind for centuries. Today they still believe that the physical body and its demands, the community, and other such matters are in the closest connection with that happiness. But granted that conceptions still move on this low plane, time is long. And already we have come so far that most people, at the moment of their death, do experience a flash of it; it is precisely that which gives a nocturnal graveyard such a homogeneous atmosphere, once we have grasped this circumstance. And some day, as the existence of mankind continues, it will yet spread into the kingdom of the living. (Matson 1938: 272–73)

There is once again very little here that can be considered problematic. I find only three spots that deserve comment; of them, only one might be put down either to an inadequate command of English or to a foreignizing formal interpretant. The most significant problems in all three, in fact, lie in Matson’s reading of the Finnish. The first is Jääkäri menee miehineen jo tuolla etäällä pois hautausmaalta, literally “The Jaeger goes with his men already over there far away from the graveyard,” which Matson translates as “The officer and his men already march far away from the graveyard.” This is the one spot where Matson’s English seems a little strange, and might be ascribed to foreignization: “already march,” as an action being performed in the current moment, should probably be in the continuous present, “are already marching.” The big problem in Matson’s understanding of the Finnish, it seems to me, is that jo tuolla etäällä “already over there” is an eyewitness report: it implies that we are watching them walking away, right over there. Matson gives us nothing of that. Also, since “far away” is a well-established collocation in English,



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

Matson’s wording suggests that the phrase might be chunked “already march | far away | from the graveyard” – i.e., that they aren’t necessarily moving in a direction away from the graveyard; they are far away from the graveyard, marching. In Finnish the phrase is chunked differently: “are already marching | over there far | away from the graveyard.” In other words, they’re walking away from the graveyard, and have already covered a lot of ground (though we can still see them). The other two problem spots are simpler: in translating jonka nimeä he turhaan ovat vuosisadasta toiseen aprikoineet, literally “whose name they in vain have from (one) century to another pondered” as “the definition of which has occupied mankind for centuries,” Matson omits “in vain.” He might of course argue, plausibly, that the fruitlessness of that pondering is implicit in “occupied for centuries.” And in translating Mutta vaikka asiat vielä ovatkin niin karkealla kannalla, literally “But although things still are on such a rough basis” as “But granted that conceptions still move on this low plane,” he’s placing a narrow interpretation on “things” to make them “conceptions”; but again, he could argue that “conceptions” are implicit in Sillanpää’s narration here. Both of the “problems” in this paragraph are in fact very minor, and easily dismissed as judgment calls; but they are nevertheless cases where Matson is naturalizing rather than foreignizing. 3.3 Matson’s interpretants As we saw in Chapter 2, Venuti (2008) specifically isolates two different types of interpretant that sway the translator: a thematic interpretant that helps the translator transform the source text into a target text containing new ideological material (translations of Kafka by the Muirs that subtly draw on Christian ideological formations, for example) and a formal interpretant that guides the translator to a purpose-oriented translation mode, like semantic equivalence, or, most important for Venuti, the choice between fluency and foreignization. And as we’ve seen here in Chapter 3, Matson’s insistence on form as the methodological baseline for all critical approaches to a literary text – including, presumably, translation – he is most likely to be found applying formal rather than thematic interpretants; but that remains to be seen. 3.3.1 Observing Matson translating One of the recurring observations I have made throughout my analysis of Matson’s literary translations between English and Finnish is that, except in the case of Seven Brothers and the rare line in other works (the last line of his Portrait of the Artist, for example), he tends to foreignize fluently: to work very hard to convey to

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

the target reader as much of the foreign feel of his source text as he possibly can, while still bringing his target text into rough apparent conformity with the target culture’s existing literary canons of “good writing.” We found this dynamic in his translations into Finnish of Joyce and Faulkner, and in his translations into English of Kallas and Sillanpää. The only real difference between these translations and Seven Brothers, in fact, was that in Seven Brothers he seemed less successful in assimilating his foreignizations to a “fluent” target-language register, so that the translation read like “translationese” – the traditional accusation that the foreignizing tradition from Schleiermacher to Venuti has worked hard to coopt, primarily through stylization. Compounding the impression of failed foreignism or translationese at a more analytical (comparative) level was my discovery that Matson’s awkward English could not always be derived from a foreignizing attention to the contours of Kivi’s Finnish; at several junctures he seemed to be complicating and clumsifying Kivi in English gratuitously. Since Venuti has always championed non-standard usage as a foreignizing strategy, regardless of whether it reflects the specific formal qualities of the “foreign” (for Matson local) text, this discovery cannot be taken to rule out foreignism tout court; but it does tend to make a foreignizing reading of Matson’s Seven Brothers a more difficult case to argue. But then I submit that any foreignizing reading is a difficult case to argue, largely because Venuti never quite specifies what he means by foreignism. He tends to define it by example, so that you gradually develop a vague sense of what he means by it, and hopefully begin to recognize it when you see it; but this vagueness also means that in specific analytical contexts, examining specific translations and translation histories, it’s often hard to draw the absolute binary line between “fluency” and “foreignism” on which Venuti everywhere insists. My own vague sense of foreignism is that it is both a. defined in abstract textual (structural) terms, as a kind of Literalism Lite, recognizable in stable (not rhetorical, intersubjective, or phenomenological) ways as a transfer of source-language features other than “pure” transcendental signifieds – syntactic structures, idioms, collocations, and so on – into the target text; and b. designed or expected to have a very specific ethical and political impact on the target reader, to thwart that reader’s conventionalized expectations and thus to instigate some sort of cognitive and possibly affective transformation that, in the aggregate, is potentially politically liberating. The obvious clash between (a) and (b) there is never, to my knowledge, resolved in Venuti’s theorizing about foreignism; but neither is it ever quite brought to the fevered pitch implied by “clash,” since the vagueness of his depictions precludes or prevents the analytical framing of submerged tensions as overt logical contradictions. For Venuti, I think it is fair to say, foreignism is a translational phenomenon



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

that is at once not quite textual (it is grounded in social interaction rather than the abstract comparison of static textual properties) and not quite intersubjective (it is an objective describable event rather than a group illusion or fiction). And in fact his new focus on the interpretant as a channel of force plies very much this same neither-nor middle ground as well: it too is not quite textual (it is an institutional/ ideological impulse that structures our readings of texts, not a property of the texts themselves) and not quite intersubjective (note the depersonalized action in lines like “Translation does not so much clarify the meaning of the foreign text as aim to fix a meaning in it by creating formal and semantic possibilities that work in the translating language and culture” [Venuti 2008: 35]). Now of course given the difficulty of classifying anything, the fact that I wasn’t sure, here and there, whether a given sentence or paragraph translated by Matson should be considered “naturalized” or “foreignized” is not a serious complaint about the binary itself. Not only is there likely to be a significant middle or overlap between any two binary poles, or any two adjacent categories in a more complex system, but in many ways the difficult-to-distribute middles are the most interesting and revealing part of any system. Is “and blood shall squirt around us even then” foreignizing? If so, what makes it so? “Squirt,” “around us,” or the awkward and difficult-to-parse framing of “and ... even then”? More interestingly: is Matson’s partial assimilation of Faulkner’s modernist prose to prevailing Finnish canons of literary prose foreignizing? How far must a translator assimilate an alien literary strategy before it becomes naturalizing? Or: if “She settled in her always favorite place, on a stone bench, behind which against a wall grew blooming rose bushes” would be a slightly odd (and therefore arguably foreignizing) translation of Hän asettui ainaiselle lempipaikalleen, kivipenkille, jonka takana muuria vasten kasvoi kukkivia ruusupensaita, does that make Matson’s adjustment of that syntax to “She settled herself in her favourite spot, a bench of stone, behind which rose-bushes in bloom grew against the wall” naturalizing? And, if so, does that by extension make any adjustment of source-text syntax to target-language syntactic patterns naturalizing? These are useful analytical questions – useful not only for the theorist worrying the concept of foreignism, but for the translator as well, worrying just how much to adjust this or that passage to what s/he takes to be the target reader’s expectations. The fact that the conceptual vagueness of Venuti’s fluency/foreignism binary forces us to ask them is surely an argument for rather than against it. Still, my brief look at excerpts from Matson’s translations suggests that there are several classes of examples that Venuti’s various binaries (thematic vs. formal interpretant, fluency vs. foreignism) cannot adequately address; and I’d like to devote the rest of this chapter and all of the next to a closer look at them. Take for example the passages in which I suggested that Matson was almost imperceptibly “stiffening the narrative joints” of his texts: adding partitioning

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

punctuation and syntactic indicators of temporal sequence, causation, and possession in Joyce’s Portrait and Faulkner’s Wild Palms, and dropping the hook between paragraphs and adding punctuation to slow down the allegretto movement of the narration in Fallen Asleep While Young. These are, obviously, all formal qualities of a text, and constative (abstract-structural26) text-linguistic rules have been formulated to describe the patterns generally considered effective; Gideon Toury would also certainly insist that there are translational norms that would cover the proper literary transfer of such features from one language to another. The interesting question that this sort of constative formalism begs, however, is how we know what norm to apply in any given context. When does a hook need to be translated, and when is it really superfluous? Different languages handle such cohesive devices differently; the translator cannot simply assume that reproducing the exact same syntactic structure will achieve functional equivalence in the target language. In the case we’re referencing, from Matson’s translation of Sillanpää, I agree with what I take to be Matson’s assumption that a literal translation of itsekin would be too much in English: Hän tunsi itsekin häissä hyvästi virkistyneenä would then become “He felt himself too at the wedding well refreshed,” and even if we moved those components around a little, making that “He felt himself well refreshed at the wedding too,” or “He too felt himself well refreshed at the wedding,” the hook feels wordy. My native-speaker intuition tells me that the phrasing needs to be backed off a little; but how much is a little? That same native-speaker intuition also tells me that Matson backed it off too far, in “He felt greatly refreshed by the wedding” – that we do need a hook of some kind there. But does that make me right, that I intuit the need for a hook? I would cut not only “himself ” but “well,” there – “He too felt refreshed at the wedding” – feeling that in this context we don’t really need an intensifier for “refreshed.” Matson obviously felt differently: he dropped the hook but kept the intensifier, shifting it only to “greatly.” What guides these choices? We teach first-year writing students how to build such hooks, but they face a similar problem, simpler because monolingual, but still in a sense a version of the same problem: when is a hook the best transition from one paragraph to another? Ultimately the first-year writing teacher ends up saying the same thing as the experienced literary translator, something like “you have to learn to feel it” – which means what, exactly? Once we’ve learned when and how to build an effective hook-transition, what are we feeling, and where does that feeling come from? 3.3.2 The rhetorical interpretant In Venuti’s terms what we are feeling must be an interpretant, a collectivized channel of sway – but what kind of interpretant? A formal interpretant? I’m frankly not even sure I know what that means any more. It seemed at first a sensible way of



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

talking about the binary choice between naturalizing and foreignizing strategies; but the more closely we look at specific instances of that choice, the less sensible and useful the idea of a “formal” interpretant seems to become. What is form? Is it inert abstract structure? The assumption that it is precisely that is one we typically associate with formalistic thought; but inert abstract structure is the very antithesis of sway, of preconscious group guidance, of the kinds of habits implicit in “you have to learn to feel it.” An inert abstract structure may be the end result and outward sign of the sway wielded by a formal interpretant – though I’m not sure it always is, or even ever is – but the collective influence wielded over the writer or reader of that structure must be something other than inert and abstract. What I’d like to suggest is that the regulatory context for all formalisms, and all thematisms, and indeed all human knowledge, is rhetorical situation, or what in Robinson (2003) I call “performativity”: someone trying to do something to someone else with words, or images, or gestures and facial expressions. Nor is this a unidirectional action, rhetoric as persuasion as X trying to persuade Y: being persuaded, or refusing to be persuaded, or sufficiently resisting being persuaded to be only partially persuaded, is doing something to someone with words as well. Y believing X’s persuasion is as powerful a speech act as is X persuading Y. Not only that: in some sense they are the same speech act, a group speech act (see Robinson 2003: 95–99) called “persuasion,” performed by persuader and believer in concert. Not for nothing did the Attic Greeks use the same word, pistis, for both persuasion and believing: X and Y to a very high degree collaborate in the speech act of persuading. To the extent that communicative form and theme are shaped by habitualized interpretants, therefore, I suggest that the Ur-interpretant would have to be a rhetorical interpretant – an affective channel of sway or regulatory pressure that is reticulated through a group (even an imaginary group, when we write or translate for an absent audience) as what Aristotle called to endekhomenon pithanon “the available persuasivity,” which might be translated more loosely as “the available resources for persuasion.” In Rhetoric 1.2 Aristotle lists some of the significant among those resources: the emotional states (pathē) of the people present, as legible on the communicative stages of their bodies (discussed in Book 3 as hupokrisis “acting,” technically translated “delivery,” loosely translated “body language”); the dispositions (hexesi) of the people present, as legible in markers of age, gender, class, and so on; the things people are currently talking about, and the topoi they use to talk about them; and so on. Aristotle’s Book 3 discussion of style and acting also suggests that the use of pitch, volume, tone, pacing and timing, facial expression, gesture, posture, and other nonverbal and paraverbal signals to structure persuasivity in speech; and, to get back to our problem cases from Joyce, Faulkner, and Sillanpää, punctuation, syntactic indicators of temporal sequence, causation,

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

and possession, and cohesive devices like paragraph hooks in writing should also be included here. I would also want to add the relational cues that structure conversational turn-taking to this list, along with their written equivalents, especially introductions with a backward glance at “the literature” and conclusions with a forward glance toward future research. Indeed turn-taking is an excellent example of the kind of habitually (but also emergingly) organized communicative behavior that is swayed by the rhetorical interpretant, because it tends to be regulated by the group: the decision regarding when the speaking turn is to be handed over is made neither by the current speaker alone nor by the next speaker alone, but by both working together; nor, for that matter, are those participants in the conversation not currently striving for a speaking turn utterly passive observers. They too contribute actively, with their body language – eye contact, posture, and other regulatory signals of shifting attention – to the “decision” to pass the speaking turn on to another speaker. The sway wielded by and through the rhetorical interpretant over social interaction is reticulatory. It is channeled not just unidirectionally from speaker to listener but through the group’s complex reticulation of collectively self-regulatory impulses. 3.3.2.1 Bakhtin’s internal dialogism My model for this reticulation, which at the end of Chapter 2 I called the somatic exchange, is in large part derived from Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “interindividuality” of language, according to which every word spoken or written is performed by the whole group, largely because our selves are relational constructs, built not only out of how I want to present myself to you but out of my internalizations of how you represent me. In Valentin Voloshinov’s (1930/1973: 86) snapshot of this Bakhtinian principle in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, “I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view” – but note that preceding and succeeding snapshots of that ongoing reticulatory process would include “I anticipate the verbal shape another’s point of view will give me,” “I accommodate the verbal shape I am giving myself to my anticipation of the verbal shape another’s point of view is now giving me,” “I give verbal shape to another’s perspective on me,” and so on. As Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson (1990: 129–30) exfoliate this process: In fact, an author’s style is developed over the course of a lifetime, on the basis of constant interactions with others, which become part of the way he or she speaks and thinks. Each of these interactions is two- (or multi-) sided, as are all utterances. As Voloshinov observes: “‘Style is the man,’ they say; but we might say: Style is at least two persons or, more accurately, one person plus his social group in the form of its authoritative representative, the listener – the constant participant in a person’s inner and outward speech” (V: DiL, p. 114).



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

One of Bakhtin’s most famous terms for this interindividuality of language is “internal dialogism”: every word comes to us saturated with the voices of the people who have been using it, most recently the conversational or written context in which we have just heard or read it, a context in which we are participants and thus further “internal dialogizers” of the word. Uttered words and phrases are thus minidialogues or verbal and tonal relationalities that in a sense pass through speakers and listeners, through individuals and groups, picking up new voices and tonalizations and attitudinalizations with every new context in which they are uttered. Robinson (2003: 112–13) offers a revision of Bakhtin’s (1929/1984: 199) classification of types of double-voiced discourse, as follows: First type: overt multiple voicing – the speaker’s internal dialogue or pandemonium of voices is frankly made public, reflected openly in speech or writing – Bakhtin’s active type: the sideward glance at someone else’s hostile word, the word with a loophole, etc. Second type: overt multiple voicing with a hierarchy imposed – the speaker gives the impression of being in control of the other voices that striate his or her speech – Bakhtin’s passive type, both varidirectional (parody and the use of an unreliable narrator) and unidirectional (stylization and the use of a reliable narrator) Third type: covert multiple voicing with a hierarchy imposed – the speaker gives the impression of speaking with only a single voice, either his or her own or someone else’s – Bakhtin’s objectified and direct unmediated types

Here the idea is that the saturation of the word with voices, tonalizations, and attitudinalizations is the default, the basic reality of human communication, and that some writers – Dostoevsky is Bakhtin’s primary example, and we will be taking a close look at two Dostoevsky translations in Chapter 5 – openly and unashamedly display that multiple voicing in their writing (first type). Other writers, under pressure from a rhetorical interpretant demanding the illusion of individualistic rational control over alien voices, work harder to subordinate those voices to a single voice presented as “their own,” typically by quoting, which is to say by clearly marking the boundaries between “own speech” and “alien speech,” and by overtly and hierarchically attitudinalizing the quoted speech, imposing a tonal interpretation on it, either negative (parody) or positive (stylization) (second type). By far the great majority of writers since the Enlightenment, especially nonfiction writers, imbibing the modern rhetorical interpretant’s insistent rationalism, seek to give the impression that there is only one voice that matters (at a time), the

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

speaker’s or writer’s (third type). The speaker or writer may quote another speaker or writer, but then the voice inside quotation marks is that other speaker’s or writer’s alone: the operative illusion which this sort of rationalist communicator strives to convey is that s/he is not retonalizing or reattitudinalizing the quoted material. So normative is this “rational language” that Bakhtin himself began with it, as if it were a realistic option for communication, rather than, as it becomes in my revision of Bakhtin’s classification, an illusion two steps removed from actual communication. Coming out of our discussion of Eco and Venuti on the interpretant in Chapter 2, we might now want to add yet a fourth type, in which the illusion becomes that there are no bodies, no voices, no humans at all, only disembodied discursivities. This depersonalized vision of the discursive posthuman was developed by the structuralists and largely taken over by the poststructuralists; and while Lawrence Venuti’s thematic interpretant(s) would seem to be challenging the fourth type – as we’ve seen, he writes of agency and performativity – his formal interpretant(s) of choice nevertheless continue(s) to sway his specific verbal formulations to it. Given the pressure placed on translators by a conventionalized rhetorical interpretant not to present themselves to the target reader as authors – indeed not to present themselves to the target reader at all, to seem invisible, like a window to the original – we may expect translators to protest their innocence of any deliberate (or possibly even inadvertent) retonalization or reattitudinalization of the source text, which is to say, to insist on their adherence to the third type. And when we do find evidence that despite these protests the translator has indeed reattitudinalized the text, we may expect the attitudinalizations that they have introduced to be of the second type, including various parodic and stylized versions of the source author’s words. Overt use of the first type tends to push a translation into the realm generally called “adaptation” – though there are famous radically innovative translations, like the Zukovskys’ of Catullus, which unashamedly plump for the first type as well. We might also build speculative bridges from the overtly multiple-voiced translation to the translation as Barthean writerly text. 3.3.2.2 Pathos, ēthos, and logos Let us now imagine a conflation of Peirce’s late emotional-energetic-logical interpretant triad with Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion, which he calls pathos, ēthos, and logos: pathos (the appeal to the audience’s emotions) as the emotional interpretant, ēthos (the creation of a speaker-persona that will incline the audience to believe the speaker) as the energetic interpretant, and logos (the use of rational argumentation to convince an audience) as the logical interpretant. On the face of



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

it the only significant adjustment there is from ēthos to Peirce’s energetic Second, or vice versa; but when we remember that for Aristotle ēthos or “character” is action-based, both developed inwardly and displayed outwardly through behavioral choices, it should not be difficult to see a rough congruency between ēthos and the energetic interpretant as well. The speaker has to do something, to act, to perform character in some outwardly sensible way, in order to construct and project ēthos, just as in the energetic interpretant the interpreter has to do something “muscular” or kinesthetic in order to apprehend the meaning of a sign. The deeper and more complex problem with that Aristotle-to-Peirce conflation, obviously, is that Peirce’s late interpretant triad seems to mark off the phases of interpretive response to a sign of a single “Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter” (Peirce 1931–1958: 536), while Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion are explicitly relational: pathos is the speaker’s attempt to evoke an emotional response in the audience; ēthos is the speaker’s creation of character for an audience; logos is the speaker’s attempt to marshall logical reasoning in order to sway the audience. Things become even more complicated when we remember that for Aristotle pistis is not just persuading, not just what the speaker does in order to sway the audience, but believing as well, or how the audience responds to that persuading, which as we’ve seen makes persuasion what I’ve called elsewhere (Robinson 2003: 95–99) a “group speech act,” a speech act performed by the speaker and audience combined. And indeed it is ultimately impossible to separate the speaker’s appeal to emotion off from the audience’s feeling of that emotion, or the speaker’s creation of character off from the audience’s participation in that character: for how is the speaker to know what the audience is feeling before, during, or immediately following the speech if s/he does not participate in that feeling? And how is the speaker to know what kind of ēthos will be most likely to incline the audience to respect and admire the speaker unless s/he feels her or his way into their inclinations? For Aristotle the speaker and audience collaborate in the formation of a group (body-becoming-) mind that invokes-and-feels emotion and creates-and-vets character. And given that the pattern logical reasoning most typically assumes in practical reasoning for Aristotle is the enthymeme, derived from en “in” + thumos “passion, courage, fighting spirit,” so that according to Jeffrey Walker (1994, 2008: 84–85) the best translation of enthymeme is “encouragement,” in logical persuasion too the group (bodybecoming-)mind feels its way to the most convincing argument. But in fact Peirce’s conception of the quasimind is not nearly as individualistic as it would at first appear. In the 1906 “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism” (Peirce 1931–1958: 4.551), for example, he notes that “signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter,” which, while putting the two into relationship with one another, would still seem to distinguish and individualize them; but then he goes on to add that “although these two are at one

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

(i.e., are one mind) in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded.” Even though one quasimind quasiutters the sign and another quasimind quasiinterprets it, “in the sign” they are a single collective quasimind. Peirce remarks self-ironically that this sounds like a lot of “loose talk,” and indeed it is difficult to decide just what kind of container the sign is that it might have an “inside” inhabited by two quasiminds welded into one; but if we take “the sign” here to be not a thing or a place or a container but a relation, or a relationality, an encounter in which participants blend and interchange, Peirce’s specific formulation can be in a sense reversed, so that a “sign” (along with the interpretants habitually attached to it) is whatever collectivity or relationality is to be found “in” the meeting or welding together of two quasiminds as one. As he writes to Lady Welby on March 9, 1906, “All thinking is necessarily a sort of dialogue, an appeal from the momentary self to the better considered self of the immediate and of the general future. Now as every thinking requires a mind, so every sign even if external to all minds must be a determination of a quasi-mind” (Peirce 1977: 195). And on the next page, having defined the intentional interpretant as “a determination of the mind of the utterer” and the effectual interpretant as “a determination of the mind of the interpreter,” he goes on to define the communicational interpretant or “cominterpretant” as “a determination of that mind into which the minds of utterer and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication may take place” (ibid: 196–97). Peirce himself was repeatedly at a loss to define a given semiotic phenomenon as either a sign (emitted by the quasiutterer) or an interpretant (marshaled by the quasiinterpreter). A signal example of this is tone, the First in the tone-token-type triad that he sketchily theorized earlier in the “Prolegomena” (1931–1958: 4.537), which both carries the quasiutterer’s semiotic content that is subject to interpretation and serves as an interpretant that guides the quasiinterpreter’s understanding – with the proviso that the actual utterer can occupy the quasiinterpreter’s role (trying to figure out what his or her own tonalizations signify) and the actual interpreter can occupy the quasiutterer’s role (which is precisely Barthes’s notion of the writerly text). The quasimind that meets (“fuses”) in and emerges out of the relationality of quasiutterer and quasiinterpreter is, I suggest, very much the same kind of group (body-becoming-)mind that in Aristotle persuades-and-believes, or invokes-and-feels emotion, or creates-and-vets character, or encourages (or encouragingly organizes) through enthymemes. If we follow this quasi-Aristotelian/quasi-Peircean (and overtly and fully Bakhtinian) thinking on the internal dialogism of every sign, then, the rhetorical Ur-interpretant that I posited in Section 3.3.2 might be imagined as consisting of: – a pathetic interpretant, which channels group evaluative affect into the shaping of meaning;



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

– an ethical interpretant, which channels group kinesthetic exertion into the construction of the speaker’s character; and – a logical interpretant, which channels group habit-formation into the articulable organization of what is said or written. Let us examine those in reverse order. 3.3.2.2.1 The logical interpretant Of the three rhetorical interpretants suggested by my Aristotelian revision of Peirce, the logical interpretant (though not under that rubric) has been virtually the exclusive focus of translation studies since Cicero: all the segmentationalist (word-for-word vs. sense-for-sense) theories, all the endless debates over whether verse must be translated in verse, certainly all the error analysis. It must immediately be noted, of course, that until Eugene Nida introduced reader-psychology into the equation with his concept of dynamic equivalence, the organizational issues regulated by the logical interpretant were invariably mystified as autonomous structural regimes somehow inexplicably possessing objective ontological stability. Nida may be credited with opening the discussion of what I’m now calling the logical interpretant to a rhetorical analysis – although of course his treatments of dynamic equivalence tended in the end to mystify rhetorical situation as well, idealizing the source-text reader and the target-text reader as abstract types rather than actual empirical human beings. Nida’s practical concern was still fundamentally with what Jerome defined as sense-for-sense translation; the minimal gestures he made in the direction of rhetorical situation (equivalence of impact on the source and target readers) mainly offered a slightly more complex understanding of “sense” or “meaning” as something understood by a real person. Perhaps the first serious and thoroughgoing effort to define what I’m calling the logical interpretant would be Gideon Toury’s (1980: 54) theorization of “matricial norms,” which in his terms “determine (or at least highly affect) the very existence of TL material intended as a substitute for the corresponding SL material (and thus the degree of fullness of translation), its location in the text (or the form of actual distribution) and the textual segmentation – both suprasentential and textual (literary) proper. They also determine the extent to which such omissions, additions, changes in location, and manipulation of segmentation are openly referred to in the translated works themselves (by means of statements such as abridged, adapted, and the like).” But note that rhetorical situation remains only implicit in Toury’s formulation as well. As he conceives translation norms, they are operationalized versions of professional (marketplace) values that are internalized by each individual translator, and thus vaguely rhetorical in their origins; but once they have been internalized by the translator, they become operating systems that

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

simply dictate the correct way to translate, no longer subject to the pushes and pulls of rhetorical situation. The logical interpretant would also be the home for what Venuti calls the formal and thematic interpretants; but again specifically now as organizational impulses aimed at maximizing rhetorical impact, which is to say, impact on or through an audience. 3.3.2.2.2 The pathetic interpretant The pathetic interpretant, then, is that affectively charged back-channel of speaker-listener or writer-reader communication by which pleasure is had. As Roland Barthes (1973/1975) reminds us at brilliant length, that pleasure can take many forms in responses to literary texts and dramatic performances, including such not particularly pleasant emotions as horror and heart-wrenching grief, so long, as Aristotle says, as all “negative” emotions are purged or purified in the end: catharsis is, obviously, one of the most powerful literary or dramatic forms of sway guided and regulated by the pathetic interpretant. But there are many others, including the visceral (and according to Barthes erotic) pleasure we take in a well-turned phrase, a striking image, a surprising trope, a pithy and apt characterization – in what Charles Martindale calls “the aesthetic.” Here, obviously, is where I redeem my promise to expand Venuti’s model of the interpretant in order to make room in it for something like Martindale’s aesthetic theory of translation – although of course since it is a specifically ideological model that I am reworking, my expansion offers an etiology for aesthetic pleasure and thus fails to celebrate “the aesthetic” as an autonomous realm free of causation or determination, as Martindale would prefer. As Martindale (2008: 90, quoting Kant 1790/1952: 55) himself formulates “the aesthetic,” it is identified through a Kantian judgment of taste, which “is necessarily singular: ‘since I must present the object immediately to my feeling of pleasure or displeasure, and that, too, without the aid of concepts, such judgments cannot have the quantity of judgements with objective general validity.’” This Kantian principle famously makes aesthetic judgment radically subjective, but Kant’s great philosophical innovation was the notion that subjectivity is in fact universal, because we are all created by the same God: “All that it holds out for is that we are justified in presupposing that the same subjective conditions of judgement which we find in ourselves are universally present in every man, and further that we have rightly subsumed the given Object under these conditions” (Kant 1790/1952: 147, quoted in Martindale 2008: 94n55). Martindale (ibid: 94) comes at this the other way, first comparing what he calls the “heuristic necessity” of assuming that communication across language barriers is possible to Kant’s principle of “universal communicability,” then noting parenthetically that “this does not mean that in



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

practice we agree with one another in the judgements of taste we make, only that we claim that our judgements, though subjective, have validity for others as well as ourselves.” What this model makes possible for Martindale (ibid: 98–99) is an art of aesthetic translation criticism that judges the beauties of a translation not according to “precepts and rules,” and not by invidious comparison to a source text presumed by default to be in every way superior, but from the gut: I want now to ask what a beautiful translation might look like. ... Within a Kantian aesthetic framework, such an enquiry can only be conducted by means of examples. According to the Third Critique (sect. 34), the job of the critic is not to issue general rules: the ‘matter upon which it is competent for critics to exercise their subtlety’ (there may be some irony here) is ‘not one of exhibiting the determining ground of aesthetic judgements of this kind of a universally applicable formula – which is impossible’. Rather the critic’s task is either what Kant calls the ‘science’: ‘the investigation of the faculties of cognition and their function in these judgements’ (Kant’s own main concern in the Critique), or what he calls the ‘art’: ‘the illustration, by the analysis of examples, of their mutual subjective finality, the form of which in a given representation has been shown above to constitute the beauty of their object’. The ‘art’ involves ‘the reflection of the Subject upon his own state (of pleasure or displeasure), to the exclusion of precepts and rules’, and this task alone, in Kant’s view, the literary critic can usefully perform.

Clearly, here, Martindale forswears the “science” of criticism, Kant’s “main concern,” and perhaps mine as well, for the “art.” The significant difference between Kant’s “investigation of the faculties of cognition and their function in these judgements” and my own is that, where Kant traces those faculties back to God, and thus to universality, I follow twentieth-century post-Kantian social-constructivists in tracing them back to culture(s), and thus to conflicting lines of collectively (culturally, ideologically) habitualized sway that I am here following Venuti in calling by the terminological shorthand of “interpretants.” The way Martindale sets up his argument, he absolves himself of the need to agree or disagree with Kant on the divinely ordained universality of subjective judgments of taste: by cleaving exclusively to the “art” of criticism he moots the question of where taste and its standards and judgments come from. They just are, in all their glorious singularity. 3.3.2.2.3 The ethical interpretant The ethical interpretant, finally, is that energetic channel of the rhetorical interpretant through which the group coaches and conditions each speaker or writer in turn to put his or her best foot forward, to win the audience’s trust by staging a partially idealized persona or character (ēthos). We might even want to argue that

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Translation and the Problem of Sway

it is the ethical interpretant that gives the translator some small vestige of visibility – that, to the extent that visibilization involves the translator’s belabored climb up from the absolute objectified and instrumentalized invisibility of the third type (I’m not adding a voice to the source author’s, what you hear is all the author, not me, I’m not here at all, I don’t exist) into the attenuated visibility of the second type (yes, I’m here, but this isn’t my story, I’m just passing it on, and yes, it’s marginally possible that a smidgen of my own interpretive attitudes toward the text have snuck in here and there, but believe me, I’ve kept that to a bare minimum), that climb is sherpaed by the ethical interpretant. In an expanded version of Venuti’s model of foreignizing translation, for example, the ethical interpretant would be the channel of sway through which the translator assures the audience that s/he is deliberately translating awkwardly, that to the extent that the translation feels a bit like translationese, it is carefully stylized translationese and therefore in no way a product of incompetence or inattentiveness, but rather an ethically serious translation strategy. The ethical interpretant is thus also the patron saint of translatorial narrativity, to which we turn in Chapter 6. As a preliminary example of the kind of protests to which the ethical interpretant inclines the literary translator, let me translate a passage from Matson (1945:╯43): When one translates Kivi into a foreign language, it feels as if one had decided to copy in clay a statue cast in bronze. True, if one shapes assiduously enough, one does in the end create something with the dimensions and form of the original, but the lights that dance on the bronze, the deep shadows, are gone, as is the original’s natural handling of its material, guided by the creative imagination. The translator would like to assure every reader individually: This is what it looks like, all right, but you should see it cast in bronze!

Like many translators of literary classics that seem to resist translation, Matson wants to assure his target readers not only that the original is far better than the translation, but that he too is a far better translator than this one translation of Kivi would suggest: “I don’t know another writer whose works are so impoverished when they are translated,” he adds, “except perhaps Shakespeare – masters in the same class” (ibid).

3.3.3 Analytical applications Let us now think back through the examples we have gleaned from Matson’s translations and biography, and apply this expanded rhetorical conception of the interpretant to them. I suggest there are four separate issues here, the fourth of which I propose to hold over until Chapter 4: (1) “stiff narrative joints”; (2) the interplay of



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

“correctness” and “pleasure” that contributes to an impression of a “good literary translation”; (3) the ways in and extent to which we trust and channel what linguistic and literary skills and cultural markers we have in order to establish cultural belonging; and (4) the shifting titration of “familiarity” and “strangeness” in the interaction between the translator and the target reader. 3.3.3.1 Stiff narrative joints You’ll recall that we seemed to find, here and there, an almost imperceptible stiffening of the “flow” or fluidity of narration in Matson’s translations – that in several cases Matson seemed to scale back connectives (dropping the paragraph hook), to slow down the narrative pace by adding punctuation (inserting an extra comma into the line about white and black arms in Joyce, replacing a comma splice with a semicolon and adding new commas in Sillanpää’s close-third-person narration of Kustaa’s happiness), and to use punctuation and other syntactic strategies to partition large paratactic textual segments (helping the Finnish reader to parse Faulkner’s long comma-drenched sentence with colons and semicolons). To the extent that this is a translator style, one that a comprehensive analysis of Matson’s translations could establish empirically27, it should be amenable to analysis with the rhetorical interpretant. One could apply, for example, Martin Joos’s “five clocks” of communicative style in his 1962 book by that title, the clocks essentially being levels of formality: intimate, casual, consultative, formal, and frozen. But again, recalling Valentin Voloshinov’s stricture that style is not “the man” but “the relationship” (hermeneutical Umgang), or a product of an individual’s whole history of relationships as channeled into and through the current relationship, we may want to rhetoricize Joos’s account by suggesting that an intimate style shapes and is shaped by an intimate relationship, a casual style shapes and is shaped by a casual relationship, and so on. So relational is communicative style in our ordinary conversational contexts, in fact, that we only tend to associate a given style with a given individual if that individual maintains a certain style across significantly different relationships – which tends in turn to be something we notice when that individual’s communicative style is not quite appropriate to the current conversational context, too casual for a consultative context, say, or too formal for a casual context. Style is only “the man himself ” (Le style c’est l’homme même), as George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon famously said in his 1753 inaugural address to the Académie Française, “Discours sur le style,” to the extent that “the man himself ” fails or refuses to adapt his communicative style to each new conversational context, and, say, speaks to his wife, the cook, his five-year-old son, the bootblack on the corner, Christophe de Beaumont (Archbishop of Paris), his subordinates at the Jardin du Roi, and, say, the great Voltaire in precisely and inflexibly the same style.

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

The rhetorical interpretant, then, would normally guide us to adapt our communicative style to each conversational context, and, in translating, to the style of each source text. If we find that Alex. Matson has a tendency to use a slightly stiffer or more formal style than his source author across numerous translation jobs, whether he is translating Kallas or Sillanpää or Joyce or Faulkner, then we may want to say that he is “choosing,” or perhaps dispositionally gravitating toward, an ethical interpretant that would have him stylize his character along certain more or less consistent lines. We might then want to liken the relative stiffness of his translatorial style to the proverbial stiff upper lip of the English gentleman, or to Grice’s (1975/1989: 26–27) maxims “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required,” “Be relevant,” and “Be brief ” – maxims that in fact many critics have likened to the stiff upper lip of the English gentleman (for discussion, see Robinson 2003: 128–30) – or even, possibly, to the tweed suit that Matson had made up for his trip to St. Petersburg in 1910, or the slight English accent he affected in Finnish. Whether we decided to associate the relative stiffness of his style with Englishness, though, and the values associated with a culture that was famously older, more established, and more aristocratic than the young peasant culture that Finland still was in the first half of the twentieth century, and thus also with a social status considerably higher than his own origins as a poor Finnish sailor’s son, the ethical interpretant would in any case give us an analytical handle to pull when we discovered what we took to be consistent signs of a translatorial style. In Matson’s case, we might want to take this particular ethical interpretant to be sending the message to target readers: I am calmer, soberer, more rational, and yes, more formal than some; but for that very reason you can trust me to be conveying the form and the content of this text accurately, reliably, and above all sensibly, without straying into flashy trends or deplorable emotional extremes. Again, though, let me note the conditional mood I employ in that previous paragraph: I am emphatically not saying here that Matson increases the stiffness of the texts he translates in order to sound like an English gentleman, or in order to signal to the target reader that he is soberer and more rational than some. I am specifically saying that if one wanted to make such a case, one might want to proceed in something like this fashion with the ethical interpretant. My focus, in other words, is on the expansion of Venuti’s conceptual model of the interpretant; Matson is enlisted in that project only as hypothetical exemplification. 3.3.3.2 The interplay of “correctness” and “pleasure” In the course of my analysis of Matson’s translations of Faulkner (Section 3.2.1), you may recall, I paused to enumerate some tentative observations: that (1) Matson foreignized Faulkner fluently, deviating slightly but significantly from the foreignness of his source texts in order to naturalize it, or to give the Finnish target reader



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

the impression that he had naturalized it; that (2) these deviations from strict foreignism might be attributed to Matson’s quest for “the vision contained in the original form,” that the deviations were therefore vision-driven, and that the sway driving Matson’s sense of that vision emerged out of mid-century Finnish literary culture, with its strict canons of grammatical acceptability; and that (3) Matson somehow manages to equalize or integrate the pull of those canons with the pull of Faulkner’s formal vision, and that his equalization can best be depicted phenomenologically in terms of the literary pleasure it provides the reader. Now we are in a position to note that (3) would involve a convergence of the logical and the pathetic interpretants. The logical interpretant would set up relational (writer-reader) expectations of correctness, a fidelity both to key elements of the source text (what Matson would want to identify as “the vision contained in the original form”) and the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the target language; the pathetic interpretant would pressure the translator to balance those two pulls pleasurably. The obvious corollary of this observation for a discussion of foreignism is that the foreignizing translator contemplating a superficial swerving from both TL correctness and the duty to provide the target reader pleasure must first steel himself or herself against the normative disapproval s/he will feel being channeled through the rhetorical (logical/pathetic) interpretant, as the internalized agent of “translation” (the translation marketplace, the target reader, and so on). As one essential component in this “steeling” or bracing against normative disapproval, the foreignizing translator might next be imagined as escalating the signals being channeled through him or her from the ethical interpretant to the target reader to the effect that s/he as the translator of this piece is competent and has a serious ethical design – in other words, signals that the apparent swerve from target-language correctness and target-reader pleasure is only apparent, only superficial. These signals channeled through the translator and the target text by or as the ethical interpretant will be designed to evoke in the target reader both a revised response to the logical interpretant, a new conception of “correctness” as tied to the foreignness of the source text or some form of linguistic or literary minority, and a revised response to the pathetic interpretant, taking pleasure in the stylization of “awkwardness.” But that would be the idealized model of foreignism. Let us return now to the problematic case of foreignism with which we began this chapter, Matson’s Seven Brothers. What can this expanded rhetorical model of foreignism tell us about it? In Matson (1934), having first wondered in general how a physically finite book could possibly be perceived as infinitely productive, and suggesting that “art is not the stable property of any book or painting but is based on the experience or a series of experiences that the book or painting awakens in us; and the measure of

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

its greatness is the power, richness, and variety of those experiences” (ibid: 7), Matson begins discussing Kivi’s novel as one of the great masterpieces of world literature, and exploring the sources or channels of its greatness. One of those channels, he suggests, is the fact that the seven brothers themselves are larger than life, that they seem to jump off the page into the reader’s life, and live there like old friends (ibid: 8–9): How I used to anticipate, back in my youth, every quip of Eero’s [the witty youngest brother] – typical of youth, this admiration for Eero! – and how relatively impoverished Eero’s materialistic nature now seems, his inability to worship anything. While translating Kivi, and thus for many years associating closely with the brothers, I increasingly grew fond of Juhani, turbulent, full-blooded Juhani, whose proud heart is purest gold. Juhani is like the epitome of some primitive force in us humans – that primitive force that drives us to fight against the powers that would limit us. Juhani is a dynamic person whose will and guts are greater than his strength.

Yes: but then how, believing this about Juhani, does Matson justify putting in his favorite character’s mouth bathetic lines like “we were trounced like Christmas pigs and now strut here like real Christmas brownies”? Or again: “Kivi identified so powerfully with his tale that his vision takes on plastic form and is expressed as large, bold images. In order to convey them, language must appeal to the reader’s creative imagination, not his or her intellect. To fulfill his purpose Kivi uses all of language’s persuasive strategies: he does not write normal prose, which is always fundamentally intellectual, but poetic language. He does not analyze or photograph; he creates” (ibid: 9). Presumably this means that the translator too must “appeal to the reader’s creative imagination, not his or her intellect,” and to that end must write poetically rather than clinging timidly to “normal prose.” And it seems Matson himself would agree, and would agree also with the claim that he didn’t manage it: “To the question of whether Kivi can be translated into another language, I would answer: only to the extent that poetry in general can be translated” (ibid). And: “When we further reflect on just how integrally rhythm, euphony, and contents are fused in Kivi’s sentences and longer passages, it begins to seem clear in advance that a translation of Kivi can contain only part of that Kivi that we know. And unfortunately, so it is” (ibid: 10). In other words, to translate Kivi’s greatest writing – Seven Brothers and Heath Cobblers – effectively, the translator would need to be as great a writer as Kivi himself; would need to have as powerful and flexible and creative a feel for the poetic resources of the target language as Kivi had for the source language. And, Matson confesses, he didn’t have that. As the translator of Heath Cobblers (Robinson 1993) and, earlier in this chapter, that page or so of Seven Brothers, I’ll go on record here as well: I don’t have it either. Kivi needs as his translator a George Chapman (1559–1634), a



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

Sir Thomas Urquhart (1611–c. 1660), a Richard Burton (1821–1890); and none of us who have tried our hand at translating him has yet brought to the task the kind of wild literary creativity of those famous translators of Homer, Rabelais, and The Book of The Thousand Nights and A Night. This kind of talk seems to bring us to the very edge of that epistemological precipice below and beyond which float such Romantic ineffabilities as “genius” and “inspiration” – that place beyond which it begins to seem impossible to trace an etiology, and thus to venture an explanation. Something like that Aerie Sphere is, of course, where Martindale (2008) firmly plants his feet in order to launch a principled assault on what he takes to be the reductionism of ideological explanations: if we can just get to a place extreme enough that ideological explanations seem inadequate, we may be able to make a convincing case that all ideological explanations are inadequate. But let us forge on regardless, and note that Chapman and Urquhart achieved their literary pyrotechnics in part by embellishing their originals, by translating a Homer and a Rabelais that they themselves conjured up out of the capaciousness of their own creative imaginations, and that that effect, at any rate, can be explained quite easily using the model of the rhetorical interpretant. We can track Chapman’s use of the fourteener in the Iliad and the loose iambic pentameter rhymed couplets he retreated to in the Odyssey when the fourteener didn’t seem to fit that epic. We can track the condensation of Homer’s lines as Chapman tries to squeeze his poetic exuberance into five feet. We can also watch him at work expanding upon Homer, inserting whole long passages of his own creation, or scaling back Homer’s genial tolerance for Odysseus’s opponents, like Polyphemos or the suitors, whom Chapman insists on vilifying as dastardly enemies. We can watch him at work, very much like Matson on Joyce and Faulkner, internalizing the logical interpretant’s pressures toward both source-text and target-language correctness, but also redirecting those pressures to accommodate his own vision of Homer, and the ethical interpretant’s flexibility in his self-presentation as a visionary poet, and above all his overflowing enjoyment of the pathetic interpretant’s always apparently excessive hedonism. If we want to say that Burton gives us The Book of The Thousand Nights and A Night (1855/1905) both exuberantly, like Chapman translating Homer and Urquhart translating Rabelais, and accurately, like Matson translating Kivi – I can’t check this claim about the Nights, but the claim has been made – or, following Martindale, that Dryden’s Ovid is both spirited and faithful, then really, all we need to do with the model of the rhetorical interpretant is to say that Burton and Dryden were swayed more powerfully by a conservative or conventional logical interpretant than Chapman or Urquhart but still managed to supercharge the impulses they were getting from the pathetic interpretant. The fact that this sort of

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

accomplishment is difficult enough to be exceedingly rare does not ultimately render the rhetorical interpretant less relevant or less successful as an explanatory model. Venuti’s mobilization of Peirce’s interpretant for ideological analysis is not, after all, addressed to the hows; only to the whys. His concern is not with the kind of life or the kind of literary education or the kind of love of language or what have you that would make it possible to translate literature successfully; it is, rather, with the cultural pressures that make it seem necessary to (strive to) translate in certain ways, or to define translational success in certain ways. 3.3.3.3 Cultural belonging In terms of the expanded rhetorical model of the interpretant, in fact, Matson brings to the translation of Seven Brothers very much the same ideological orientations and pressures as Burton brings to the translation of The Book of The Thousand Nights and A Night: capture the precise meaning of every individual sentence in the source text, stick as closely as you possibly can to the original syntax, archaize the target text’s style (use “thou hast” and “quoth he”), and yet make the result a delight to read. This ideal of total translation is widely considered to be impossible: you can’t have sense-for-sense and word-for-word translation; you can’t have literalism and even a coherent target text, let alone a pleasurable one. That Burton is said to have accomplished it with the Arabian nights, and at sixteen volumes, may mean that he was a genius, or it may mean that translating folk tales is not particularly difficult (the source text tends to be simple and formulaic, and many of the same formulas exist in many cultures), or it may mean that the reports of his success (and his genius) are exaggerated: never mind. That Matson patently came nowhere close to succeeding at his task with Kivi, that his Seven Brothers is not only painful reading but not even all that accurate: again, never mind. All the interpretant model claims to be able to explain is how both translators came to construct their task as they did. Well: that is how Venuti envisions the model. As I noted earlier, I would like to push it a bit further – not quite into the realm of demystifying “genius” or “inspiration,” but a step or two in that direction. What I would like the model of the rhetorical interpretant to explain is what prompted Matson, despite his acute awareness of Kivi’s overwhelming difficulty and his own inadequacies as a writer of English literary prose, to agree to translate Kivi’s novel – even to assert that he was the best man for the job. Perhaps in fact he was, at the time; but one still expects a certain frank circumspection in matters like this, a decent trepidation before an almost insurmountable task. He had already tried his hand at revising Professor Cowl’s draft into workable shape, and given up: he knew what he was up against. He must even have had a fairly good sense of the fantastic odds against his succeeding. And yet he not only bragged that there was no one who could do it



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

better than he, but shot for the moon – opted for the single most challenging translation strategy we know, the most difficult to pull off, the least forgiving of the translator’s literary inadequacies: archaizing literalism. He didn’t decide to protect his vulnerable flank with a less ambitious approach, say by rendering (and introducing) Kivi’s novel as a simple modern paraphrase without literary pretensions, but with at least the virtues of clarity and accessibility. Nor, having striven for archaic literalism, did he present the result, like Nabokov (1941) describing his Pushkin, as a meticulously accurate but deliberately unlovely scholarly crib, perhaps useful to a later translator with less Finnish and more grace. Instead, he proclaimed to everyone who would listen his aim of winning for Kivi the international recognition he deserved as one of the unsung greats of world literature, and repeatedly bemoaned foreign critics’ failure to see that brilliance through his English translation. And, while humbly confessing that “Kivi can be translated into another language ... only to the extent that poetry in general can be translated,” and that “a translation of Kivi can contain only part of that Kivi that we know” – not, incidentally, that his literary skills were inadequate, but that anyone’s would be – he spent nearly the rest of his life refusing to allow anyone to revise his translation, as if it were pure gold. It is often difficult to see one’s failings clearly, or to own up to them honestly. Others can usually see our inadequacies far better than we can ourselves. But Matson’s blind obstinate hubris in this matter strikes me as more than a simple human foible: it seems more like a compelled blindness, a form of sway that seems like an irrational bias (and I suppose basically is) but nevertheless guides him like a norm, an ideological impulse. I suspect, in fact, that the source of his hubris in the Seven Brothers translation is a collective voice that whispered to him of his deep fundamental Englishness. He was a Finn, obviously; but an English Finn. He was an Englishman in the body of a Finn. As I began to suggest in Section 3.1.4, above, it seems sensible to me to think about our sense of cultural belonging as collectively swayed by habitualized interpretants, specifically by the habits organizing the ethical interpretant that regulates self-presentation. We might mark off two extremes on a scale of “cultural belonging.” A person who felt a strong loyalty to the local culture in which s/he was born might also feel not only a strong disinclination to learn foreign languages but an inner affectivebecoming-conative pressure to present herself or himself (the ethical interpretant of everyday life) verbally and kinesically as “no good at foreign languages.” This would mean signaling L1 group loyalty through both a publicly declared and an energetically displayed incompetence at foreign-language learning, especially through belabored bodily stagings of the L2: the body language of “I can’t do this” (slumped shoulders and helpless surrender in the eyes, listless posture and

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

gestures, etc.), the apparently helpless/hopeless use of L1 phonological and intonational patterns that are surreptitiously dismissive or even contemptuous of the L2, and so on. This would be the “positive” pole – positive, that is, for belonging. A person like Captain Richard Burton, on the other hand – translator of The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui: A Manual of Arabian Erotology (1886) as well as the ten volumes of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night and The Supplemental Nights to the Thousand Nights and a Night (six more volumes, both collected in Burton 1855/1905) – who repeatedly and unashamedly “goes native,” sends the opposite message: I don’t belong to my own group; it can’t hold me. This would be the “negative” pole, the rejection of cultural belonging. Not only did Burton learn French, Italian, Neapolitan, and Latin as a child, during his family’s peregrinations about Europe; when he enlisted in the army of the East India Company and was stationed with the 18th Bombay Native Infantry in the (now Pakistani) province of Sindh, he developed the habit of going walkabout for months at a time, living with different peoples and learning their languages, then returning and passing the linguist exams for them. Within a few years he had become fluent in Hindustani, Gujarati, Punjabi, and Marathi, as well as Persian and Arabic. And just as he had antagonized his schoolmates back in England, so too did he antagonize his brothers-in-arms in India: they called him “the White Nigger,” a sobriquet reflecting their sense that he had no proper loyalty to his English birth or his white skin. Eventually his commander, General Charles James Napier (1782–1853) – of whose clever translational implicature upon capturing Sindh, Peccavi (“I have sinned”), Paul Grice (1975/1989: 36) writes in “Logic and Conversation” – realized the value of such a man and made him his covert agent: an excellent career opportunity for a man who never wanted to belong to his own group, who instead loved to put on cultural identities (not just verbal languages but body language, habits of dress, and other ordinary social practices) as an actor slips into a part. His famous book A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah (1855/1893) was the story of such an imposture; and he was virulently attacked for it by several European commentators.28 Matson, as we’ve seen, fell somewhere in between these two extremes: having learned two languages as a child, he took great pride in his bilingualism, and tended to parade it a bit, with exaggeratedly English dress and a slight English accent – but also had to work exceedingly hard to maintain both languages, and never quite felt quite at home in either one. It seems reasonable to suggest that he experienced bilingualism neither as (“negative”) freedom from the (“positive”) strictures of sedentary belonging nor as an expanded kind of (“positive”) belonging to a cosmopolitan interculture, as Richard Burton may have done, but as a conflicted belonging – as pressure from two different cultures to belong equally to each. He was, we may want to speculate, swayed to be at once entirely Finnish and entirely



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

English, and could never quite figure out how to manage the inner conflicts that resulted. In terms of the rhetorical model of the interpretant, this might be figured as dual ethical interpretants: be Finnish, and present yourself as a Finn; be English, and present yourself as an Englishman. Be not only a native speaker of each language, but a fully assimilated and at-home member of each culture, and experience the “other” language and culture (each in turn, and in some sense simultaneously) as an interloper, impostor, intruder. It seems to me that something like this inward conflict might have explained Matson’s troubled mixture of pride (I’m the only person who can translate Kivi) and humility (no one can translate Kivi), and his ineffectual vacillation between the two. Even monoculturally the habitual inclinations and dispositions associated with the ethical interpretant are complexly involved in the affective-becomingconative reticulation through the culture of intertwined pride and humility – humble before the manifest reasons to be proud, proud to be so humble – as promissory indications of “character,” “integrity,” “honesty,” “uprightness,” and so on, the attributes a speaker or writer is expected to project to his or her audience in order to win their trust and secure their belief. The precise admixture of pride and humility expected of a speaker or a writer will vary from culture to culture, and from group to group (or context to context) within any national or linguistic or ethnic culture; but mixing the two in just the right proportions for one’s current audience would appear to be a common expectation placed on speakers and writers by or through the ethical interpretant. Indeed when Matson (1934, 1945) writes to Finns about Kivi “as seen through the eyes of the translator” he is writing monoculturally, as a Finn to Finns. The fact that as the translator he proclaims himself to be in his titles he speaks and writes English well, that he has had to project himself as a native speaker of English to his English-speaking readership, is really irrelevant to the Finnish audience of those two articles: he addresses his readers in both as a Finn who has loved Kivi since he was a child, as they have; as someone who has inherited a love of Kivi’s novel as his birthright as a Finn. His status as Kivi’s English translator is presented there as a professional role he plays, or even less than a role, as a professional reading capacity, like a copyeditor, someone who is expected to read texts more closely than most. At no point in the brief articles does he signal the slightest intercultural distress, or the slightest awareness that his bilingual predicament might cause himself or anyone else a moment’s distress. But his bilingualism and his interculturality were a predicament for him. As a result of the work of Anthony Pym (1992, 1993, 1996, 2000) and others on translator and interpreter intercultures, we have begun to recognize that we do have these intercultures, that we share a fairly well-established culture-between-cultures with other translators and interpreters; but for Matson, I would guess, interculturality

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

was a falling between two chairs, what Schleiermacher (Robinson 1997a: 235) calls “the unpleasant middle” between Finnish belonging and English belonging, each of which, through its habitualized ethical interpretant(s), put pressure on him to cleave to it alone. And this predicament should suggest to us that implicit in the mixing and compounding of pride and humility in the ethical interpretant and its cultural habits is the repression of shame – that which is forcibly excluded from pride-andhumility, projected onto others, perhaps, onto political or moral or cultural opponents, never publicly admitted in the self – and that never quite being able to live up to any one group’s ethical interpretant’s pressures would have intermixed great quantities of otherwise (and perhaps still partly) repressed shame in with Matson’s pride and humility. It was arguably the confluence of shame and pride that fueled Matson’s obstinacy on the subject of revising Seven Brothers, or allowing someone else to revise it: redoubled and therefore inflexible pride as a counterbalance to (or suppressor of) shame. I also began to adumbrate, back in Section 3.1.4, the complex phenomenology of language proficiency: “what is it about our sense of our own ‘command’ of a language,” I asked there, “that encourages or discourages us when we translate out of it or into it, or generally read or write in it?” What inward feeling of skill, talent, vision, and so on, makes us willing to call ourselves “poets,” or “writers,” or willing to translate literary texts of which it is said that only a poet could or should translate them? In a sense “poet” or “literary translator” is a performative identity, but as Judith Butler (1993: x) warns, a performative identity is not a dramatic role, as if “one woke in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored the garment to its place at night” – not the same as the nineteenth-century Richard Burton playing a Muslim in order to make hajj, or the twentieth-century Richard Burton playing Marc Antony opposite Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra. When Butler says to her friends that she is going to Yale to “be a lesbian” (1991: 18) – to speak at a gay and lesbian conference, and thus to present herself publicly as a lesbian – she doesn’t mean that she isn’t a lesbian, and is “only playing” at being one; her performative identity is a public enactment of something that she feels inside, and thus constitutes what she calls “deep play.” My question here is: what drives that “deep play”? What ethical interpretant tells the budding poet that she’s good enough to start performing herself as a poet – or tells Alex. Matson that his English is good enough to translate Kivi’s novel with? When I lived in Finland I felt my Finnish was good enough to take on English>Finnish translation and interpreting jobs, and so I did, quite often; pragmatically speaking, the fact that I didn’t get any complaints about the quality of my translations by default means that my Finnish was in fact good enough, though



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

certainly not perfect. After I moved back to the US in 1989, I continued translating in both directions for several years, until I began to feel increasingly uneasy about translating into my L2 – and kept doing it, but made sure I built time into my project timeline to get my translation checked by a native Finn. The difference I felt was a phenomenology of uncertainty: I would get stuck comparing possible phrasings in my head, and couldn’t make up my mind, and would end up guessing. I no longer felt I had an “instinct” for the right word or phrase. To borrow an example from Matson, I would think things like: which is it, The blood would spray? The blood would spurt? The blood would squirt?, and would not have a strong intuitive sense of which verb worked best, so I would guess: “The blood would squirt.” And then I would worry: is that right? Is that the best verb? And then I started getting comments from native speakers of Finnish that my translations probably needed to be edited, and since those comments seemed to confirm my own inner doubts, at first I did; but eventually I stopped accepting all such jobs. It was too much extra bother. I do believe that these “instincts” or “intuitive certainties” that we develop about wordings and phrasings, and rely on heavily in both writing original works and translating, are regulated by habitualized rhetorical interpretants, and specifically, in Peirce’s terms, by the habit-changes arising out of repeated interpretive engagements with similar rhetorical situations. As my “squirting blood” example suggests, these habit-changes would attach to logical interpretants, but in expanding circles of somatic contagion that channeled pathetic interpretants (a habitualized feel for the pleasurable “smoothness” or “flow” of both affective and kinesthetic phenomena like rhythms and euphonies and cognitive phenomena like lexical recall) into ethical interpretants organizing self-image, self-esteem, and selfpresentation. I believe, in other words, that the phenomenology of linguistic confidence or certainty is shaped and directed – swayed – by collective forces; and also that those forces signal to us our uncertainties as well, our inadequacies, our weaknesses, our failings. Certainly it is true that the stereotype of Americans (like all stereotypes partly based in empirical observation) would have most of them (us) “hearing,” feeling, receiving in some fashion, “messages” or impulses from collective “places” or forces that tell them they (we) can’t learn foreign languages and they (we) can’t write; one of the most important tasks performed by beginning foreignlanguage and writing instructors is overcoming that self-critical voice in their students’ heads. There is also, however, the odd student who seems utterly and inexplicably deaf to those voices, numb to those affective messages: the student who loves to write though s/he does it atrociously, and does not seem to improve despite great enthusiasm and the composition field’s best learning strategies. And of course we all know people – perhaps we are ourselves those people – who are deaf or numb to the quite strong and publicly available signals of their own competence, or even brilliance, and go on believing, against all evidence, that they are no good.

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

In a sense, as my borrowing of the “blood squirts” example from Matson’s Seven Brothers suggests, his experience translating into English may have been similar to mine translating into Finnish: he didn’t feel confident about the best English words and phrases, and so really should have had his work edited, as Aino Kallas insisted when he worked on her fiction; and indeed he should have had a better sense of his inadequacies in English, and not waited for a source author or acquisitions editor to insist on that editing. There is, however, an important difference between his experience and mine. I felt most confident and most successful translating into Finnish while living in Finland, and indeed had to work hard to maintain a “native” feel for my native English, which I felt I was losing without being surrounded by it; and I began to gain confidence in my English and lose confidence in my Finnish after moving back to the US. Matson, on the other hand, translated Kallas and Kivi woodenly while living in London in the 1920s, and there produced successful translations of Kallas with an editor and a highly problematic translation of Kivi without one; but then returned to Finland and produced successful translations of Sillanpää without an editor. How do we explain that? I think at least part of his relative success translating Sillanpää without an editor and relative failure translating Kivi without an editor may be explainable through the ethical interpretants habitually supporting and supported by patriotism: Sillanpää was just a job; Kivi was Finland. One might assume that that sort of orientation would produce the exact opposite results, that Matson would dash off something just barely passable when he believed he was translating just some recent realistic novel that didn’t mean anything to him, and would work extremely hard to do his best possible work when translating the greatest and most beloved novel in the Finnish language, the novel he grew up loving – and ironically, he may both have believed that those were the results of his labors and have proved himself wrong precisely as a result of that belief. In other words, not particularly caring how good his Sillanpää translations were may have caused Matson to relax and produce good solid work, while caring inordinately how good his Kivi translation was may have caused him to overwork it, and above all to overthink it, and produce a mess. After all, this is the man who wrote that “language must appeal to the reader’s creative imagination, not his or her intellect. To fulfill his purpose Kivi uses all of language’s persuasive strategies: he does not write normal prose, which is always fundamentally intellectual, but poetic language. He does not analyze or photograph; he creates” (Matson 1934: 9). And so to recreate Kivi in English, Matson starts wondering whether he should use the Finnish sinä “(informal) you” throughout, as in: “Did sinä really mean what sinä said about Old Mother Pinewood and her daughter?” This is language that appeals to Matson’s intellect – the logical interpretant in his head that tells him that English “you” doesn’t capture every tiny nuance of Finnish sinä – and not to the reader’s creative imagination. And it is a



Chapter 3.╇ The case of Alex. Matson 

sign, I suggest, that Matson isn’t letting himself go, isn’t trusting his rhetorical interpretants to guide him to a creatively powerful translation: he has to master the thing, dominate it with syntactic and semantic analysis.29 Perhaps he didn’t have a Chapman or an Urquhart in him. But Alex. Matson, contrary to my first impression of him in Seven Brothers, was an explosively creative writer, a restlessly transformative writer whose original work was always fresh and sinuous and alive, and whose translations were, with that single exception, both highly accurate and almost perfectly attuned to his readers’ creative imaginations.

chapter 4

The spatiotemporal dynamic of foreignization Приемом искусства является прием “остранения” вещей и прием затрудненной формы, увеличивающий трудность и долготу восприятия, так как воспринимательный процесс в искусстве самоцелен и должен быть продлен.  (Shklovsky 1925/1929: 12) Art’s device is a device for the “estrangement” of things, a device of belabored form that increases the laboriousness and duration of perception, because in art the perceptual process is self-purposive and should be prolonged.  (translation DR)

4.0 Introduction: The phenomenology and structuralism of foreignism In defining the interpretant as “a pattern of use in a cultural practice that is performed and regulated within a social institution,” Venuti (2008: 32) doesn’t exactly depersonalize or dehistoricize the phenomena he wants to describe; indeed, as we’ve seen, he gives brief situated examples of the operation of interpretants in the French magazine cover from the 1950s and the history of translating Proust and Kafka into English, and a lengthier example, which we will be considering closely in Chapter 5, from the history of translating Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov into English. Unquestionably, patterns of use, cultural practices, performances and regulations, and social institutions are all socially and historically situated phenomena. The brevity of his analyses of these examples, to be sure, might make it seem as if he were not as deeply engaged with the historicity of the interpretant as a Marxist ought to be; but that perception is more a function of the theoretical rather than analytical nature of his primary interest in the interpretant. The interpretant as he theorizes it actually is situated historically. But there is another aspect to the historicity of the interpretant that I suggest Venuti does tend to neglect, theoretically as well as analytically, and that is the fact, to which literary theorists from the German Romantics through the Russian Formalists to Brecht and beyond have directed our attention, that the “feeling of the foreign” is a feeling, a phenomenology, and one that tends to wane with time. To put it in Peirce’s terms, we tend to be acutely aware of sudden “habit-changes,” but as they gradually become assimilated into our ordinary everyday habits, we lose that edge of awareness, until it seems as if there is no longer any habit at all, just

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

“reality.” In the same way, a “foreignized” text may feel foreign at first, but with time it may (and in fact will typically) come to seem more and more familiar, until its “foreignism” or “foreignization,” to the extent that it is remembered or noticed at all, comes to feel like a structural trace or vestige of the original phenomenology of foreignness or strangeness. Any structuralist or poststructuralist attempt to theorize foreignism in stable ways, then, without taking this “phenomenological fade” into account – and I suggest that this is very much the mode in which Venuti discusses foreignism – will tend to focus on those abstract structural traces and bracket the actual historicity of the feeling-foreign. I began to broach my concern with this phenomenological historicity of foreignism back in Section 3.3.1.3, when I noted of Matson’s translation of As I Lay Dying that it seems strikingly and even radically modernist for 1952 in Finland. It may have felt new and strange and foreign in Finland in the early fifties – we don’t know, since most of us reading this book weren’t there then – but now, based on [a] what we can see in the text, [b] what we have heard and read about the Finnish literary scene in the early fifties, and a channeling of (a) and (b) into [c] an imaginary reconstruction of Finnish readers’ phenomenological response to it back then, it seems to us as if it must have felt that way. All that are left of what we reconstruct as that “original” historical phenomenology are textual traces and theoretical modelings – the “structuralism of foreignism,” as it were. This problem, the fading of the phenomenology of foreignism and its habitualized interpretants into structural/textual traces, and thus into (post)structuralist discursivity, is the topic of this chapter. Speaking of historically situated phenomenologies: when Venuti (1986, 1992) and a few others – especially Eric Cheyfitz (1990) and Tejaswini Niranjana (1992) – first began touting foreignism or some other form of literalism as the politically and ethically preferred translation mode, I found their theoretical innovations unbelievably exciting and promising. The early 1990s were an explosively transformative era in translation studies anyway, with paradigm-busting books and articles being published at an astonishing rate, and all of us who were involved in the rethinking of old assumptions possessed by an impatience at the invisible bonds and constraints that those assumptions seemed to impose; and Venuti, Cheyfitz, and Niranjana were among the most radically transformative of all. The more closely I studied these “neoliteralist” theorists, however, the stronger grew my sense that they were begging important questions. Above all, it began to seem to me as if they were not devoting sufficient attention to the phenomenology of foreignism. All three assumed that some form of literalism or foreignism was not just theoretically attractive but actually required for the practical purpose of liberating readers from various hegemonic ideologies (the lingering legacy of colonialism for Cheyfitz and Niranjana, capitalism for Venuti); but all three also remained



Chapter 4.╇ The spatiotemporal dynamic of foreignization 

vague on the exact nature of the cognitive and/or affective aspects of reader response to foreignism or literalism that could channel this liberation. Behind their assumptions lay Schleiermacher’s (Robinson 1997a: 229–33) insistence that “carrying the reader to the author” was an essential part of an expansive education of the German people, and Benjamin’s (1930/1997: 162) mystical claim that literalism is an “arcade” that opens the target reader’s inner vision up to “pure language”: Venuti took over Schleiermacher’s pedagogical claims and radicalized them somewhat, giving them a Marxist cast, so that by resisting capitalist assimilationism the foreignizing translator became a kind of cultural dissident training target readers for similar dissidence; Cheyfitz and Niranjana took over Benjamin’s mystical claims and radically politicized them, Niranjana in particular arguing that literalist English retranslations of Indian texts that had been assimilatively translated in the service of colonial power might serve decolonization by radicalizing readers. This all sounded great, in theory. But I couldn’t help but wonder: how would that work, exactly? What kind of transformative effect can a Benjaminian “arcade” or a Schleiermacherian “carrying the reader to the author” have on the target reader? Because Venuti, Cheyfitz, and Niranjana never addressed these questions, never even raised the issue of the pragmatic pathways by which their utopian claims might be fulfilled, I ultimately decided that their vague appeals to reader response as justification for strategic literalism or foreignism, despite their promise, were sheer demagoguery. It was fairly clear that those claims were grounded not in actual qualitative research into reader response, nor even a detailed introspective or speculative theorization of reader response, but in uncritical assumptions marshaled by argumentative necessity. 4.1 “Foreignism and the Phantom Limb” It was, however, an intriguing enough question that I spent several years trying to work it all out – to deconstruct what I increasingly felt were the neoliteralists’ empty claims, on the one hand, but also, on the other, to imagine a phenomenology of translation practice that might justify something like those claims. Most of the pieces I wrote to both ends, my dual attempt to critique the neoliteralist invocation of reader response and to explore the actual pragmatics of a foreignizing phenomenology, I collected in What Is Translation? (Robinson 1997b): critiques of Cheyfitz’s embrace of Benjamin (ibid: 18–22), of Venuti’s foreignism (ibid: 97–112), and of Philip E. Lewis’s Derridean celebration of “abusive translation” (ibid: 132–77), as well as a single reimagining of the phenomenology of foreignism, an article originally entitled “Translation as Phantom Limb” (Robinson 1996), then retitled and slightly revised in What Is Translation? as “Foreignism and the Phantom Limb”

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

(ibid: 113–31). If you’ll indulge me, I propose to revisit and rethink that last-mentioned article in some detail here, beginning with a rehearsal of its key points; if you don’t need that rehearsal, feel free to skip ahead to Section 4.2. I argued first, then, that the literalist/foreignist position was based on an uncritical binarization of domestication and foreignization, assimilation and literalism, which excluded many wonderful literary translations that, like Alex. Matson’s most conventionally successful translations, incorporate elements of both. I suggested “that the interesting textual ‘middles’ that [Venuti] once excluded are all in fact assimilative, all appropriative – they do appropriate foreign ‘properties,’ make them feel like the target culture’s own – but that they do so without reducing the texts to easy transparency or fluency.” Indeed, I noted, “many good translations ... revel in all those [difficult or foreign-seeming] things Venuti claims assimilative translations weed out – but they also sound as if they had originally been written in the target language” (ibid: 115). What I wanted to argue specifically was that to be considered “good” or “successful” by target readers, a translation had to feel “right” or “natural” in the target language, had to generate in target readers the feeling that it was a text that belonged in some integral way to the target culture – but that that could and often was accomplished by “difficult” texts, texts that could not reasonably be derided (à la Venuti) as assimilative pablum. To help me explore the shifting phenomenology of this middle ground between “domestication” and “foreignization,” then, I borrowed a metaphor from Oliver Sacks’ (1985) book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, namely proprioception: “The excluded middle between static strangeness and static familiarity that I am working toward, here, is a dynamic sliding between strangeness and familiarity, a becoming-familiar that yet retains an air of alterity – an appropriation that I want to compare to a physiological sense called proprioception, that sense that makes us feel our body as our own” (ibid: 118). We know where our arms and legs are, even with our eyes closed, because our proprioceptive system senses them inwardly; neural damage to the proprioceptive system can severely inhibit our motor ability, because to walk on our legs we have to feel that they are ours, that they are subject to our will, that they aren’t just dead foreign objects visually attached to our body. I told stories about Sacks’ patient Christina, who lost her proprioception and felt her whole body was dead, and about a shocking experience I’d had after a medical procedure with only a spinal block, seeing what seemed like somebody else’s leg (but was actually mine) being lifted across my field of vision over a curtain; and then I tied proprioception back to translation through the phenomenon of the phantom limb (ibid: 119–20): Where all this begins to connect up with translation, though, is in Sacks’ sixth chapter, on prosthetics and the strange proprioceptive phenomenon of the



Chapter 4.╇ The spatiotemporal dynamic of foreignization 

“phantom” – which Sacks defines as “a persistent image of memory of part of the body, usually a limb, for months or years after its loss” (66) – and the striking fact that, as Sacks quotes Michael Kremer as saying, “no amputee with an artificial lower limb can walk on it satisfactorily until the body-image, in other words the phantom, is incorporated into it” (67). If we take this, provisionally, as a metaphor for translation, the translation would be the prosthetic device – an artificial, mechanical contrivance designed to replace a textual limb “lost” through the targetlanguage reader’s inability to read a text in the original language – that only comes to feel real, native, strong enough to “walk on” or live through, when a proprioceptive “phantom” is incorporated into it. This would constitute a tentative explanation of how a foreign text can be appropriated “strangely” into the target language: what makes any text feel “at home” or “one’s own” in any language is not the mere fact that it was written (originally or otherwise) in that language, nor the mere fact (or illusion) that it was written in the kind of reductively and unproblematically “fluent” or “transparent” idiom that normative linguists like to reify as “ordinary language” – but the incorporation into it of a proprioceptive phantom, some nexus of felt experience that charges the text, any text, with the feel of reality, of “one’s-ownness,” of proprioception. A text that is charged with that felt experience – by individual readers, by groups of readers, by whole cultures – will feel real whether it is an original or a translation, whether it is domesticated or foreignized, whether it is easy or difficult to read. A text that is not charged with that felt experience will be like my leg above the curtain, like Christina’s body: a dead thing, a foreign object.

“Suppose,” then, I wrote, that “the translation is a dead thing, black marks on the page, that has to be ‘brought to life’ by a reader, infused with proprioceptive meaning by a real person. It would then make an enormous difference for our understanding of translation as prosthetic and as phantom limb if the real person bringing the inert marks to life were (a) the author, (b) the translator, or (c) the target-language reader” (ibid: 120). And I devoted the remainder of the essay to explorations of those three possibilities. 4.2 David Bohm on proprioception The question that nagged at me while I was writing that essay, though, and that has occurred to me again whenever I’ve recurred to that argument in the years since it was published, concerned the degree or nature of metaphoricity involved in it. All I was claiming in “Foreignism and the Phantom Limb” was that translation could usefully be thought of in terms of proprioception, theorized by comparison with the phantom limb phenomenon. Translation, it seemed to me then, could not literally be theorized in terms of proprioception, because proprioception is an

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

individual phenomenon, bounded by the skin of each individual body, and like all human communication translation is social, collective, transpersonal, by definition radically unbounded by skin. If the proprioceptive or phantomatic projections of the various readers involved in translation were purely individualistic, purely based on each one’s experiences, if indeed no interpersonal experience were possible, then, clearly, no communication would be possible either, no social understanding. The proprioceptive phenomenon of the phantom limb as a description of what happens in the reading of translational and other texts must, therefore, be purely metaphorical. And yet I couldn’t help suspecting that there was something else there, something more than metaphor. These nagging doubts were reactivated for me when I stumbled on David Bohm’s (1994: 121) description of a woman who woke in the middle of the night hitting herself. What had happened was that she’d had a stroke that damaged her sensory nerves, which would tell her what she was doing. But the stroke left the motor nerves so that she could still move her muscles. Apparently she had touched herself, but since she wasn’t being informed that it was her own touch she assumed right away that it was an attack by somebody else. Then the more she defended the worse the attack got. When the light was turned on, the proprioception was reestablished because she could then see with her eyes what she was doing, so she stopped hitting herself.

This is not entirely accurate, in fact: what happened when the woman turned on the light was not that “proprioception was reestablished,” but rather that another bodily monitoring system was activated, the visual. But Bohm is going very interesting places with proprioception, in particular to what he calls “the proprioception of thought.” By this he means something like awareness and control of the thought process, on the model of our proprioceptive awareness and control of our bodies; his argument is that proprioception is just another layer of awareness, so that, as we can generate a proprioceptive map of body movements, and in fact that map can become a mental image or thought, so too can we generate a proprioceptive map of our thoughts. Proprioception of the body prevents us from making the kind of mistake that woman made, thinking that the arms touching her belonged to someone else, that she was being attacked; proprioception of thought prevents us from making the same mistake on the emotional or mental level, as in paranoia, thinking that certain persecutory thoughts or feelings or intentions are coming from other people when in fact they are being generated inwardly. Just as the woman who awoke fighting herself drew the proprioceptive boundaries of her physical body too narrowly, excluding her own arms, so too does the paranoiac draw the proprioceptive boundaries of his or her socioemotional body too narrowly, excluding his or her own desires, fears, motivations, projections, and so on. Whatever is excluded from “own” becomes by default



Chapter 4.╇ The spatiotemporal dynamic of foreignization 

“other.” And conversely, of course, it would be equally debilitating to draw those boundaries too widely, to believe that the fist smacking you in the face is your own when in fact it belongs to someone else, or to believe that the manipulative pressures being brought to bear on you are your own when in fact they are being directed to you by someone else. What is most interesting for me in this example Bohm offers, however, lies elsewhere. Note that, feeling touched by a hand from the far side of the own/other line, the woman did not experience that touch as random or neutral; she experienced it as an attack. The experience of being touched physically by someone else is not just a matter of not proprioceiving the touch, not just a matter of the touch lacking the inward feeling of proprioception that would tell us that the touch was coming from our own limbs; it is actively and meaningfully alien. We experience another person’s touch as something, as a positivity, not just negatively as “not ours.” We experience it as the touch of a stranger, an enemy, an athletic opponent, a child, a mother, a friend, a lover. We feel impersonal indifference in it, or irritation, or open violence, or competitive striving, or soothing reassurance, or sexual seduction. In order to be able to think proprioceptively about a perceived attack, or caress, or handshake, or tickle, therefore – in order to be able to distinguish “external touch” from “internal touch” – we need more than just internal proprioception of the body or thought; we need to be able to compare internal and external proprioceptions. There needs to be a proprioceptive channel that will enable us to scan the whole interactive body that might be touching us – the body that includes other people. We can, for example, only be tickled by another, not by ourselves, because ticklishness is collectively conditioned as an intercorporeal event, with agency proprioceptively assigned to the “other” body. Something similar occurs in sexual or reassuring caresses: it is possible to soothe or arouse ourselves with our own touch, but there is a habitualized difference between the energetic interpretants of our own caresses and those of someone else’s. These examples would suggest that proprioception of the body operates on a larger scale than that confined by the boundaries of our skin: that there is a kind of collective social proprioception of the body as well, a set of collectively habitualized energetic interpretants that guide our somatic response when someone else touches us, assigns ideosomatic meaning to that touch. The same is true of the proprioception of thought. We may be able to distinguish quite clearly between our own emotional state and the state of someone close to us, but will not experience that other person’s body state as simply “not ours”; it will have meaning for us, meaning organized and guided and explained collectively by a collective interpretive proprioception of thought. This collectivization of proprioception is in fact the direction in which Bohm is himself moving, from individual proprioceptive thought to what he calls

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

“collective thought” or “participatory thought” – or what I have elsewhere (Robinson 2008: 106–12) called the proprioception of the body politic: It’s possible to see that there’s a kind of level of contact in the group anyway. The thought process is an extension of the body process, and all the body language is showing it, and so on. People are really in a rather close contact – hate is an extremely close bond. I remember somebody saying that when people are really in close contact, talking about something which is very important to them, their whole bodies are involved – their hearts, their adrenalin, all the neurochemicals, everything. They are in far closer contact with each other than with some parts of their own bodies, such as their toes. So, in some sense there is established in that contact “one body.” And also, if we can all listen to each other’s opinions, and suspend them without judging them, and your opinion is on the same basis as anybody else’s, then we all have “one mind” because we have the same content – all the opinions, all the assumptions. At that moment the difference is secondary. The point then is that you have in some sense one body, one mind. It does not overwhelm the individual. If the individual has another assumption he can have it, it’s shared with the group and the group takes it up. There is no conflict in the fact that the individual does not agree. It’s not all that important whether you agree or not. There is no pressure to agree or disagree. (Bohm 1994: 204)

Of course in groups there often is pressure to agree or disagree: what Bohm means is that groups do not impose absolute tyrannical templates on individual behavior or thought; there is wiggle room. The problem with Bohm insisting that “there is no pressure to agree or disagree,” however, is that he thereby underemphasizes the importance of group pressure for social regulation – for the collective management of what Peirce calls habit-change. Groups do have this tendency to regulate the bodily-becoming-mental processes of all their members so as to move collectively toward unity, and ultimately to cast out any member who repeatedly or systematically refuses to conform. This is what Aristotle would call the entelechy of group behavior, the core organizing principle on which regulation is based: the telos of unity. To miss this is to paint the proprioception of the body politic (as in fact Bohm tends to do) as a kind of Rousseauistic social contract, where everyone lives in onebody-one-mind peace and harmony because each respects the others’ autonomy. 4.3 Antonio Damasio on somatomimesis Antonio Damasio’s mimetic theory of somatic transfer offers an explanatory model for the sharing not only of “contact,” of socialized or collectivized sensation, the “one-body-one-mind” phenomenon Bohm is talking about, but also of social regulation, which as I say he tends to neglect. Building upon the so-called “Carpenter



Chapter 4.╇ The spatiotemporal dynamic of foreignization 

Effect” first observed and theorized by William Carpenter (1874), that we unconsciously tend to mimic the external body language of the people we’re talking to, Damasio’s neurological research team at the University of Iowa has shown that this imitation of external body language also helps our nervous systems simulate the internal body states of the people we interact with, using what the team calls the neural “as-if body loop” (see Damasio 1994, 1999, and 2003, and, for the Damasio team’s scientific publications on the somatic mimeticism of empathy, Adolphs 2002 and Adolphs et al. 1994, 1998, 2000). Hence the well-known phenomenon of the “contagiousness” of body states, so that watching other people yawn not only incites in us an almost irresistible desire to yawn with them but actually makes us begin to feel sleepy; or so that the company of depressed people makes us feel depressed as well, and it may be very difficult to resist the high spirits of a group of laughing partiers. This is the phenomenon that I theorized in The Translator’s Turn (Robinson 1991: 10ff) as ideosomatic response – the regulatory reticulation of felt evaluative orientations through a whole group – but without Damasio’s actual research findings (which did not begin to be published until four or five years after The Translator’s Turn), my claims there seemed to many to be some kind of mysticism. My extension of Damasio’s mimetic somatic theory is that, when my as-if body loop simulates your body state, it is not simply building a bridge between the two of us but connecting both of us mimetically to the community, to the ideosomatic guidance of the collective. In somatic theory, the “body politic” is not simply a metaphor that allows us to think about collective action as if it were being performed by a single body; it is a quite literal physiological description of the collectivized body of ideosomatic guidance. This is in fact what I’m calling the proprioception of the body politic: this infectious channeling of group norms from one body to another, in the form of verbally or nonverbally signaled ideosomatic pressure to conform to collective expectations, in millions of interpersonal encounters. The meetings of people – both in outward physical reality and in the virtual reality of memory and the imagination, including the encounters we have with the characters and narrators of literary texts – are the body politic’s macroversion of the synapses that channel microproprioception through any individual’s nervous system. 4.4 The group proprioception of translation Now let’s get back to translation. What happens when the translator reads the source text and begins imagining turning it into the target language? What happens when the target reader reads the translation?

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

4.4.1 The own and the alien The first thing to note is that, contrary to my argument in “Translation and the Phantom Limb,” for the reader who knows the language in which it is written, a literary or other written text is not dead matter, not meaningless black squiggles on the page; it feels alive, feels pregnant with meaning, because it is proprioceptively structured and enlivened by the reader’s participation in the body politic of the group of language users who know that language. The translator’s source text should not, therefore, be troped as a “prosthetic” limb that must have the translator’s own experiential “phantom limb” incorporated or “fulgurated forth” into it; nor is the translation itself this sort of dead prosthetic to the target reader. The proprioception of the reader’s linguistic/cultural body politic will always signal the “ownness” of a text written in his or her “own” language, whether that is a native language or a “foreign” language to which s/he has been acculturated through study, residence abroad, and the like. We do, of course, experience varying degrees of “ownness” even in languages we know well, due to the related facts that (a) the body politic of the users of a single language is not monolithic but composed of innumerable large and small subgroups, and (b) that we tend to feel more at home with conventionalized texts than with highly innovative ones. We may call the former the “spatial” own/alien dynamic and the latter the “temporal” own/alien dynamic. Even though we belong to the same global body politic with all other users of English, for example, there are many texts written by and for English-speaking subgroups to which we do not belong, such as theoretical mathematicians or air-traffic controllers, which will be instantly recognizable both as “English” (therefore as “our own”) and as “jargon” (therefore as “alien”). Regional dialects, genderlects, and the “englishes” of other social and ethnic groups would obviously apply here as well. This spatial dynamic must constantly be negotiated by nonliterary translators, but to some extent by literary translators as well, whenever the source author belongs to and writes for a subgroup to which the translator does not comfortably belong. And new literary texts written in English (or any other language to whose body politic we belong) may also cause trouble at first when they deviate strikingly from existing literary conventions. This temporal dynamic is negotiated with radically innovative literary texts by all readers when they are first published, and then variably after, depending upon each reader’s familiarity with this author’s writing in general and a given work in particular. James Joyce’s Ulysses was difficult for most readers at first, but easier for those who were already well-versed in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man; and for those of us trained in English literature, nine decades after its first publication, it may still feel a bit difficult, but at least its difficulties have come to feel quite familiar, “own,” proprioceptively part of our literary body politic.



Chapter 4.╇ The spatiotemporal dynamic of foreignization 

Finnegans Wake, I have to admit, feels utterly alien to me – I can’t read it – but to a Joyce scholar it may be as readable as Dubliners (which may seem almost impossibly difficult to our undergraduate students). 4.4.2 Estrangement A relevant parallel here would be Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of estrangement, which is built on a foundation of the protosomatic theories of Henri Bergson (1889/1913), William James (1890), and Broder Christiansen (1909). The famous passage from Shklovsky’s 1917 “Art as Device” essay (Shklovsky 1925/1929: 12) is in fact only cryptically germane to a discussion of the proprioception of the body politic: And so, in order to restore the sensation of life, to feel things, to make the stone stony, there exists what we call art. Art’s purpose is to give us the sensation of a thing as seeing rather than as recognizing; art’s device is a device for the “estrangement” of things, a device of belabored form that increases the laboriousness and duration of perception, because in art the perceptual process is self-purposive and should be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the making of a thing, but the thing made in art is not important. (my translation)

This passage is mostly what we remember Shklovsky for in the West, calling estrangement “defamiliarization,” based on Lemon and Reis’s (1965: 12) problematic translation; the passage is, however, notoriously vatic, and would need to be unpacked at great length before it would do us much good here (for that unpacking, see Robinson 2008: 89–132). Let me just say in passing here that while Shklovsky’s conception of the estrangement device is most closely indebted to the Russian Symbolists and Futurists, especially Bely and Khlebnikov, and the general background theory of automatization (which leads to repetitive abstract “recognizing”) is grounded in Bergson, ultimately it harks back to the German Romantics, especially Novalis and Friedrich von Schlegel; not surprisingly, therefore, it is highly congruent with the 1990s notion of foreignizing translation, also derived from the German Romantics, especially Schleiermacher but also Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Goethe, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. If a literary text becomes “art” only in and through the act of belaboring form and estranging things as they are conventionally perceived, the same must be true of literary translation as well: it must estrange us in some way from what we already know, what we already feel. More on that in a moment. Shklovsky reprinted “Art as Device” as the first essay in his 1925 collection Theory of Prose; in the next piece in that collection, the 1919 essay “The Relationship Between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style,” he

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

expands further on what I call the somatics of literature, quoting at length from Broder Christiansen’s (1909: 118) book. Here is my translation of the first paragraph of the long passage Shklovsky gives, with bracketed quotations from Fedotov’s (1911: 104) Russian translation, from which a German-less Shklovsky (1925/1929: 27) quotes (and I mostly translate), but also from Christiansen’s German original: I single out only one group of unfelt forms [nicht-sinnlichen Formen, lit. “nonsensuous forms”; nechuvstvennykh form] – the one that to my mind is the most important: differential sensations or sensations of differences [Differenzempfindungen; differentsial’nye oschuscheniya ili oschuscheniya razlichiy]. When we experience [empfunden, lit. “sensed/felt”; ispytaem] anything as a deviation from the usual, from the normal, from some active/effective [geltend, lit. “in force/effect”; deystvuyushego] canon, in us is born an emotional impression [eine Stimmungs-╉ impression, lit. “a mood impression”; emotsional’noe vpechatlenie] of a particular quality, which differs from the emotional elements of felt forms [sinnlicher Formen; chuvstvennykh form] not in kind, but only in that its antecedent would appear to be a sensation of dissimilarity [eine Differenz; oschuschenie neskhodstva], that is, something unavailable to felt perception [etwas nicht sinnlich Wahrnehmbares, lit. “something not sensuously perceptible”; nechto nedostupnoe chuvstvennomu vospriyatiyu].30

The distinction Shklovsky borrows here from Christiansen’s Russian translator between “felt form” and “unfelt form” is specifically, following James (1890), that the former is available to consciousness and the latter is not – but specifically to a Jamesian somatic consciousness or awareness, a physical-becoming-mental awareness that emerges out of habitualized somatic guidance. In this case the guidance is negative: the “canon” (in Christiansen geltender Kanon “canon in force/effect,” which Fedotov translates into Russian as deystvuyushiy kanon “active/effective canon,” which Sher (1990/1998: 20) in turn translates into English as “guiding canon”) is the ideosomatic regulation of linguistic form, the collectivized/habitualized sense of normal usage that helps us organize communication meaningfully, and the reader here experiences or senses a deviation from that, a newness of some sort, an idiosomaticity. I give Sher’s (1990/1998: 21) translation back from Fedotov’s (ibid: 104) Russian translation, with bracketed quotations from Fedotov and Christiansen (ibid: 118–19); Sher’s translation modified in accordance with Shklovsky (1925/1929: 27) Why is the lyrical poetry of a foreign country never revealed to us in its fullness even when we have learned its language? We hear the play of its harmonics. We apprehend the succession of rhymes and feel the rhythm. We understand the meaning of the words and are in command of the imagery, the figures of speech and the content. We may have a grasp



Chapter 4.╇ The spatiotemporal dynamic of foreignization 

of all the felt forms, of all the objects. So what’s missing? The answer is: differential experience [Differenzimpressionen; differentsial’nykh vpechatleniy]. The slightest aberrations from the norm in the choice of expressions, in the combinations of words, in the subtle shifts of syntax – all this can be mastered only by someone who lives among the natural elements of his language, by someone who, thanks to his conscious awareness of the norm [ein lebendiges Bewußtsein des Sprachnormalen, lit. “a living consciousness of the language-normal”; zhivomu soznaniyu normal’nogo, lit. “a living consciousness of the normal”], is immediately struck, or rather irritated [wie einer sinnlichen Erregung, lit. “like a sensuous excitement/ arousal/thrill; podobno chuvstvennomu razdrazheniyu, lit. “like a felt irritation”] by any deviation from it. Yet, the domain of the norm in a language extends far beyond this. Every language possesses its own characteristic degree of abstraction and imagery. The repetition of certain sound combinations and certain forms of comparison belong to the realm of the norm, and any deviation from it is felt fully only by a person who is thoroughly at home in the language [empfindet nur in voller Stärke, wem die Sprache als Muttersprache vertraut ist, lit. “is sensed/felt only in full strength (by one) to whom the language is familiar/intimate as mother tongue; oschuschaet lish’ tot, komu yazyk blizok, kak rodnoy, lit. “senses only that (person), to whom the language is close, as ‘one’s own’”]. Every change of expression, of imagery, of a verbal combination, strikes him as a felt experience. ... Moreover, there is the possibility of dual and inverse differentials. A given deviation from the norm may, in its turn, become the point of departure and yardstick for other deviations. In that case every return to the norm is experienced as a deviation. ...31

Here, clearly, literature only comes into existence as literature to the extent that its forms are sensed by a reader – and sensed specifically as deviance from the “prosaic” regulatory norms that make ordinary verbal communication possible, or, to put that in Peirce’s terms, as “habit-change,” a break from the habitualized signscum-interpretants that constitute “language,” “rhetoric,” “genre,” and so on. Those prosaic norms too are sensed or felt by speakers of the language, although, because they have become habitualized, usually only when they are broken. They are what I called in Robinson (1991) ideosomatic norms, collective sway stored somatically in the bodies of everyone who speaks the language well, everyone who is “thoroughly at home in the language.” Literary form for Shklovsky exists as precisely this sort of felt or sensed deviance from the guiding canon, which is to say that for him the habit-breaking somatics of literary discourse exists as a deviation from the habitualized somatics of ordinary discourse: as estrangement, as belabored form, as impedance, as foreignization. “Aristotle,” Shklovsky (1925/1929: 18) writes in “Art as Device,” “says that poetic language should have the character of the foreign ... Poetic language is therefore a laborious, belabored, impeded language” (my translation).

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

Poetic language, obviously, can only be those things to a person; and specifically, can only be sensed or felt by a person. Literary effects take their power from the reader’s somatic response: the reader’s ability to sense or feel the slightest deviations from the ideosomatic or proprioceptive norm gives literature’s impact on us the intensity Shklovsky says we need in order to deautomatize our perceptions, to change our unconscious and therefore unfelt habits, and so to restore sensation to life, to make the stone stony. But it’s not just therapeutic power or impact or intensity that literary devices take from somatic response; they take their form from it as well. Authors renovate the traditional forms of literature precisely in order to manipulate the reader’s proprioceptive somatic response – that which is made by the group to feel “right” and “natural” – as powerfully as they can. Shklovsky’s third important statement of his somatic theory in Theory of Prose comes in the third essay in the 1925 and 1929 editions, “The Structure of Fiction.” He tells a story from Chekhov’s notebooks of a man who walks past a store sign for fifteen or thirty years, and every time reads it as saying “Bol’shoy vybor sigov” (large selection of white fish), and wonders “who needs a large selection of white fish?” Then one day he walks by and, seeing the sign taken down and leaned up against the wall, reads it correctly as “Bol’shoy vybor sigar” (large selection of cigars; Shklovsky 1925/1929: 79). Here is Shklovsky’s theorization of that shift in literature: A poet removes all signs from their places. An artist always incites insurrections among things. Things are always in a state of revolt with poets, casting off their old names and adopting new names and new faces. A poet employs images as figures of speech by comparing them with each other. For instance, he may call fire a red flower or he may attach a new epithet to an old word, or else, like Baudelaire, he may say that a carcass lifts its legs like a woman with lascivious intent. In this way he brings about a semantic shift. He wrests the concept from the semantic cluster in which it is embedded and reassigns it with the help of the word (figure of speech) to another semantic cluster. We, the readers, sense the presence of something new, the presence of an object in a new cluster. The new word envelops the object, as new clothes envelop a man. The sign has been taken down. This is one of the ways in which an object can be transformed into something felt, into something capable of becoming the material of an artistic work. (Sher 1990/1998: 62; translation modified in accordance with Shklovsky 1925/1929: 79–80)

“We, the readers, sense the presence of something new,” which is thus “transformed into something felt”: this, for Shklovsky, is how literature restores to us the “sensation of life,” makes us “feel things,” through significant deviation from the ideosomatic proprioception of the “guiding canon.” That canon is extremely



Chapter 4.╇ The spatiotemporal dynamic of foreignization 

important for meaningful group behavior, including communicative behavior; without it, literally nothing in human social life would be possible; we would be isolated in a world without meaning, structure, or connection. But the canon depends for its smooth functioning on automatization, habitualization, which also tends to deaden our experience of the world, so that, while we do not feel alone, neither do we feel entirely alive. Literature, for Shklovsky, as for Christiansen before him, deviates from the conventional proprioceptive canon in order to introduce enough dissonance into our guided feelings of “rightness” or “naturalness” so that we do feel alive – and then, gradually, inexorably, to the extent that literary deviation has a transformative impact on us, it too is assimilated into the canon. We first feel the new dissonant forms as deviant, as wrong, but interesting; as we grow accustomed to those forms, we come to feel them as a felt or sensuous part of that canon; then, ultimately, we no longer feel them at all; this in turn requires the infusion of yet new forms, which will again stimulate our sensation of difference, and thus of life. 4.4.3 The group proprioception of foreignizing translation What are the implications of this theory for translation? To begin with, I would now note that the literary translator picking up a source text and reading it with an eye to translating it into some target language is not just “constructing” or “imagining” a dialogue with the source author, as I argued in The Translator’s Turn (Robinson 1991: 92–123), but is always already engaged proprioceptively with the source author and her or his whole culture, just by dint of having learned the language – a fortiori if the translator has lived for any length of time in that culture. The translator is a part of, and so is ideosomatically guided by, the proprioception of the source-cultural body politic, the large group of source-language users. This belonging makes the source text feel at least partly familiar or “own” to the translator from the start, from the very first glance – and, in fact, without that feeling s/he has no business translating it at all. This is one way of restating the truistic requirement that the translator be proficient in the source language: the translator must proprioceptively belong to the source-cultural body politic, and so must feel the source text as his or her “own,” must feel “at home” in it. Obviously, of course, even if by learning the language and living abroad the translator has overcome what I called the spatial alienness of the source text (its having been written by someone belonging to an alien group), s/he may well still have to deal with its temporal alienness. A radically innovative text in a source language in which the translator feels entirely at home will still feel temporally alien. (When a classicist who has been reading Homer in Greek all her or his life decides to attempt a translation of The Odyssey into English, this same stricture

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

does not apply: whatever spatial and temporal alienness The Odyssey may have for modern readers has long since come to feel quite familiar to this translator.) So far, though, the translator is like any other bilingual reader. The theoretically interesting shift comes when this bilingual reader begins to reimagine and then to reformulate the source text in terms of the proprioception of an entirely different body politic, that of the target culture. This in the broadest view is the translator’s mediatory task: bringing these two regulatory proprioceptive bodies into some sort of alignment or convergence on the axis of “the” literary text, the dual or divergent text, the existing text that is proprioceptively stabilized by the source-cultural body politic and the emerging text that must word by word, phrase by phrase, page by page be stabilized by the target-cultural body politic. This is the dual proprioceptive stabilization that makes it possible for us – as translators or as translation critics – to speak of “equivalence”: we create in our own mediatory proprioceptive bodies a felt convergence between the two group linguistic stabilizations, the source-cultural and target-cultural, and use that convergence as a touchstone by which to evaluate the felt mesh between the two texts. Because this convergence is a somatic construct, of course, it will inevitably be constructed to some degree differently by different people: hence the endless arguments over the quality of a specific translation. Because that construct is nevertheless bilaterally stabilized by ideosomatic group regulation, however, it is unlikely that those arguments will be entirely erratic, aleatory, centrifugal, hit-or-miss. There will never be an infinite number of random subjective constructions of a stabilizing convergence between source-cultural and target-cultural proprioception. While it is unlikely that every translator or translation critic will agree as to the “accuracy” or “equivalence” or other measure of translation quality in regard to a specific translation, it is highly likely that a few issues or features will be agreed upon as the contested basis for the assessment. This, however, is only what Christiansen would call the “canonical” aspect of translation, the standard pressure exerted on translators to produce an equivalent or accurate reproduction of the source text that fits snugly or smoothly into the existing target-cultural proprioceptive canon – a text that feels “natural” enough to target readers that it seems to have originally been written in the target language. What Cheyfitz, Niranjana, and especially Venuti were struggling to articulate, back in the early nineties, was something like the translational equivalent of what Shklovsky calls literary estrangement, or what Christiansen calls “differential sensations,” the belaboring of form so as to incite a proprioceptive “insurrection” or “habit-change” in the target reader’s habitualized somatic response. The translator too, not just the original author of a literary text, can send shock ripples through the proprioception of the target-cultural body politic, and can use those shock



Chapter 4.╇ The spatiotemporal dynamic of foreignization 

ripples to instigate in target readers sensuous and perceptual and thereby also ideological change. As I argued back in “Translation and the Phantom Limb” (Robinson 1997b: 114–15), however, this does not mean that a foreignizing translation must have certain static properties – notably, that it must in some way follow the syntactic or semantic or pragmatic contours of the source text. All that is required, in fact, is some sort of strategic deviation from what readers will feel as “canonical” targetcultural conventions, so that the translation feels new and dissonant and strange. This is a point Venuti makes repeatedly as well; but because he does not situate the feel of the foreign in the translator’s or target reader’s phenomenology, his insistence on nonstandard usage tends to lose most of its edge: without each individual translator and/or target reader feeling the deviation, foreignism by default becomes a hypostatized and hence universalized structure. Indeed one of my strongest reservations about the way foreignizing translations were being theorized in the nineties was that in reality such translations may not feel new or dissonant or strange: that they may evoke in the target reader not transformative feelings of estrangement at all, but rather echoes of existing awkward texts in the target culture, texts whose awkwardness bespeaks a distantized authoritarian rhetoric, like school textbooks or bureaucratese (see ibid: 94–95). I argued back then that this sort of stultifying translation was the result of mechanical applications of a foreignizing method, a literalist template or grid; now it seems to me that it must instead be a product of authoritarian proprioceptive guidance: that foreignizing translators may fail to estrange their readers productively because it feels right to use a particular awkward style, because their stylistic choices are guided by their proprioceptive experience of awkward authoritarian texts in the target culture. The successful foreignizing translation, the translation that succeeds in giving target readers an effective estranging sensation, will not only be new and dissonant and strange, but assimilably new and dissonant and strange. For the estranging effect of a foreignizing translation to be complete, the target readers must themselves proprioceptively assimilate the new into the old, the strange into the familiar, the alien into the own: must make it part of a transformed guiding canon, a slightly but significantly altered ideosomatic target-cultural proprioception. Without this assimilation of the spatially and temporally alien, the foreign and the new, into the regulatory proprioception of the body politic, the target reader and the target culture at large can do nothing with it; it can have no transformative effect, on individuals or groups. What this also means, inevitably, is that every new “differential sensation,” in Christiansen’s terms, every act of “taking down the signs,” every “habit-change,” is ultimately destined to lose its power to make us feel alive, destined to be either discarded or conventionalized, and in either case forgotten. But this does not mean

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

that its transformative impact has necessarily been wasted. To the extent that it has had any estranging effect at all, the guiding canon has been – however infinitesimally – altered by it, pushed by it in a new direction. If that direction is resistance to capitalism or to the lingering legacy of colonialism, Venuti and Cheyfitz and Niranjana may well have been quite right to place their counterhegemonic hopes in dissident literary translation. The fact that a translation is unlikely to have a massive effect does not preclude the power of any literary text, including a translated one, to transform in imperceptible but nonetheless significant ways the proprioception of the target-cultural body politic. The larger question that concerns me in this book, however, is where the impulses come from to attempt to “take down the signs,” to transform something as large and subtle and nearly intangible as the proprioception of the target-cultural body politic. Venuti’s rather mystified Romantic-Marxist conception of the foreignizing translator as engaged in heroic resistance against the capitalist machine, back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he first began repackaging Schleiermacher for dissident translation theory and practice, has waned somewhat, though its utopian tenor remains as strong in his rhetoric as ever; the interesting question is not only what kind of interpretant might impel the translator to translate this way, but what kind of interpretant might impel the translation theorist to theorize translation in this way. Attempting to answer those questions is my project in Chapter 5.

chapter 5

Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation “Все дескать передано Тобою папе и все стало быть теперь у папы, а Ты хоть и не приходи теперь вовсе, не мешай до времени по крайней мере”. (Dostoevsky 1890/1919: 1.383) “You handed the keys to the kingdom over to Peter, the first pope, right?” “Who did?” “Shut up and listen. You handed it all over, back then, and so now you have no right to add anything to what you said back then. So what are you even doing here? Go away. And stay away, until the appointed time.” (translation DR)

As we’ve seen, Lawrence Venuti writes of only two different types of interpretant that sway the translator: a thematic interpretant that guides the translator to a transformation of the source text so as to contain new ideological material, and a formal interpretant that guides the translator to a purpose-oriented translation mode such as domestication or foreignization. What I propose to do in this chapter is to test those two interpretants on the specific translation history to which Venuti (2008: 45–48) devotes the last few pages of his article, namely the competing translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov by Constance Garnett (1912) and Richard Pevear and Larisa Volokhonsky (1990) – but specifically by way of expanding Venuti’s model in yet another direction, to enable us to think about the interpretants habitually guiding or swaying the work of translation scholars. 5.1 Venuti on translating Dostoevsky Venuti’s (ibid) argument is focused in those last few pages on the formal interpretant, and specifically the fluency vs. foreignization debate – fluency represented by Garnett, foreignization by Pevear and Volokhonsky. This tidy binarization of the two translations would appear to be strongly supported by scholars of Russian literary translation, notably Emerson (1991), a review of the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, and May (1994), a book entitled The Translator in the Text. Emerson

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

and May both analyze the Garnett translation of The Brothers Karamazov in terms of Garnett’s “normalizations” of the Russian text, and use the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation as an exemplar of the right way to translate, accurately and with close attention to the contours of the source text. As Venuti (ibid: 46) sums up what appears to be a scholarly consensus on this matter, then, “Constance Garnett, the most widely read English-language translator of Russian literature, was also among the most naturalizing in her cultivation of a fluent strategy. Her translating cast two illusions simultaneously: she invested her versions with realism and with transparency, made them seem true as representations of reality and of the Russian texts.” He adds (ibid: 47): Interestingly, readers who have not read a canonical translation may adopt a popular approach even with a retranslation that can complicate the illusionistic immediacy of their response. Compared to Garnett’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov, the Pevear-Volokhonsky version is less fluent in its effort to recreate Dostoevsky’s peculiar style, and less fluency usually entails less transparency, thereby weakening or undermining the popular reader’s identification with the text. Yet readers who first experience Dostoevsky’s novel in this version have actually encountered no obstacle to their identification.

He then quotes at some length from an on-line discussion of the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Dostoevsky’s Brothers, in particular a reader whom he calls Kay: “The depth of Kay’s engagement with the characters,” he notes after a twoparagraph quote and extensive commentary, “clearly shows that her reading was not in any way inhibited by Pevear and Volokhonsky’s recreation of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic style” (Venuti ibid: 48). My interest in Venuti’s argument here begins in the rather striking fact that his primary example of naturalizing and foreignizing translation in the article is a pair of competing translations from a language that he cannot read, rendering him incapable of checking the validity of the claims made by Emerson and May. This leaves him extraordinarily dependent, obviously, on other people’s analytical claims, but more specifically, in terms of his own theoretical model in the article, on guidance from interpretants – at the mercy, as the Brafmans would insist, on sway. If interpretants are the guiding agents of the collective regulatory power in what Peirce (1931–1958: 4.536) calls the “Quasi-mind that is the Interpreter,” then in a sense Venuti “analyzes” the Garnett and Pevear-Volokhonsky translations of Dostoevsky’s Brothers by remote control, swayed not just by Emerson and May but by and through what we saw Frau Stolze calling his Umgang or dealings with the academic Lebenswelt that makes it possible to channel such second-hand analytical material into an interpretive argument. Venuti as interpreter of these texts becomes a “quasimind” in the sense that he is not a rational subject in complete control of his own cognition, but is partly “thought” (guided, swayed, regulated)



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

by the interpretants on which he habitually relies – which is, of course, just about equally true of everyone. Just what those interpretants are, and how they guide his interpretive work as “quasimind,” remains to be seen. But let me suggest some tentative formulations now, so that we will have something to go on. The first important fact in theorizing the interpretants that guide Venuti’s work as a translation theorist, it seems to me, is that Emerson and May are professors of Russian who have published on English translations of Russian literature, Emerson also herself a celebrated translator from the Russian, and therefore presumably trustworthy guides to competing English translations of Dostoevsky. This assumption about the guarantee of expertise granted by certain professorial appointments and the vetting process involved in academic publication, I suggest, might be taken to constitute something like the metathematic interpretant guiding Venuti’s remote-control “interpretation” of the Garnett and Pevear-Volokhonsky translations of The Brothers Karamazov. In our dealings with the academic Lebenswelt, we tend to trust institutionally vetted authorities. The second important fact is that Venuti is well into his third decade of binarizing the field of literary translation into “naturalizing/assimilative/domesticating/fluency” and “foreignizing” approaches. Clearly he has an interpretive history to fall back on here, which is to say, a cultural pattern that has arisen iteratively out of his own repeated hermeneutical dealings with translated or translation-based materials, and that has been and continues to be formatively “performed and regulated” by the institutionalized academic Lebenswelt governing the development of a publishable argument. Since he now theorizes these binarized “approaches” to literary translation as formal interpretants, his reliance on his own interpretive history along these lines might be taken to constitute a metaformal interpretant. The metathematic interpretant, then, roughly corresponds to “reliance on authorities”; the metaformal interpretant is not only a “rhetorical agenda,” what we tell first-year writers they need in order to construct an effective argument – something to say, someone to say it to, a reason for saying it in a particular way to this particular audience in this particular context, and so on – but what the Brafmans (2008) would call a commitment to that agenda. But those two interpretants, reliance on authorities (metathematic) and a committed rhetorical agenda (metaformal), are not generally considered sufficient for interpretive argumentation in the humanities. Analytical interpretation as it is institutionally constructed for publication in academic books and journals typically also requires the third element of research, which in the study of literature (and literary translation) almost always means the analytical interpretation of texts in search of – or in the effort to construct – textual evidence for specific interpretive claims. In modern Western academic argumentation we normatively expect that research to be “new”

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

and “original,” which is to say that we expect it to offer a significant challenge to the authorities on which the scholar relies, and thus to advance the scholarly conversation. I suggest that we call this set of normative assumptions the methodological interpretant governing humanistic research. Now to the extent that Venuti’s research design in this article entails the comparative analysis of two translations and their original for the purposes of generating textual evidence for his claims, it should be clear that he has been forced by his lack of knowledge of Russian to forgo the normative expectation (methodological interpretant) of originality – what evidence he adduces for his claims is taken directly, untested and unchallenged, from his authorities, Emerson and May. I should also remind the reader that this is not the sum total of his research for and in the article; as we saw in Chapter 2, he relied on other authorities as well (Barthes, Eco, etc.) in order to construct his semiotic model of translation, and did interpretive research by reading the online discussion of the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation by “naïve” or non-elite readers. But to the extent that his claims about the Garnett translation being “naturalizing” and the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation being “foreignizing” constitute evidence for his rhetorical agenda (metaformal interpretant), it should be clear that in this area he has refused or renounced the methodological interpretant calling for original research, and relied entirely on the metathematic and metaformal interpretants – trust in authorities and a rhetorical commitment. We might formulate his project like this: if those two interpretants dovetail, provide each other reciprocal confirmation – if the authorities in literary translation from Russian support Venuti’s rhetorical commitment to the binary hierarchy between naturalization and foreignization, and that support for Venuti’s key conceptual binary lends added credibility to Emerson’s and May’s academic expertise, then arguably no original interpretive evidence is needed, and the methodological interpretant can be ignored. Based on these observations we might be tempted to argue dismissively that Venuti’s primary aim as a translation theorist is not so much to apply this metaformal interpretant to specific translation histories, in order to understand them better in a scholarly sense, as it is to defend the metaformal interpretant: to “prove” once again that foreignization is preferable to naturalization. This tentative critique of Venuti’s research design would suggest that if that design were more definitively aimed to enhance scholarly understanding of translation, he would feel more strongly inclined or swayed to test his authorities’ claims against the textual evidence (methodological interpretant). I want to return in Section 5.3.2 to complicate this tentative formulation, and in an important sense to overturn it; before we turn to a close look at a single passage from Dostoevsky’s Brothers in Russian and the two competing English translations, however, it seemed essential to put what must be regarded as the



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

normative scholarly assessment of Venuti’s typical research design on the table for consideration. What I propose to do in the remainder of this chapter is twofold: first (5.2), to open myself to the sway of the methodological interpretant and adumbrate the scholarly project that Venuti’s theoretical practices would appear to have neglected, by attending more closely and more analytically to Dostoevsky’s Russian Brothers and the Garnett and Pevear-Volokhonsky translations; and second (5.3), to take one more pass through the retheorization of the interpretant, this time as a driving hermeneutical force in theoretical work. 5.2 Two Dostoevsky translations In presenting the Garnett (1912) Brothers as a signal and problematic case of naturalization and the Pevear-Volokhonsky (1990) Brothers as an admirable exemplar of foreignization, Venuti relies partly on May (1994), but most heavily on Caryl Emerson’s review of the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, “The Brothers, Complete” (Emerson 1991) – which in fact cites May’s (1990) Stanford dissertation, on which the 1994 book is based. Emerson’s review is extraordinarily detailed and wonderfully written, ranging widely through approaches to translation, a brief history of Dostoevsky’s reception in Russia and elsewhere and translations into English, and a fairly comprehensive comparison of the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation with the Russian original. She does not perform for us the kind of close textual analysis that I offer here, which I suggest to some extent vitiates her claims, and in any case makes those claims more problematic for use in lieu of actual interpretive research by a Russian-less Venuti; but she has examined a large number of key passages in Dostoevsky’s original and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s renditions, and summarizes her findings extensively. 5.2.1 Dostoevsky’s “bad writing” The big question Emerson raises in her review is the nature of what to many Russian readers seems to be Dostoevsky’s “bad writing”: the incredible sloppiness of his prose, his flat, prosaic, often stumbling rhythms, what appear to many to be his undermotivated and stylistically unintegrated colloquialisms, his apparently rushed and often seemingly random repetitions, his tendency to overemphasize everything, his frequent lapses into melodrama and cheap sentimentality. Specifically, she is concerned with whether this “bad writing” is the result of laziness and sloppiness, an uncritical or unprocessed saturation in trashy pop culture, and a tin ear, or is in fact intentional and brilliantly innovative. As she notes, Vladimir Nabokov

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

and Joseph Conrad thought it the former; Emerson herself, following the consensus of late-twentieth-century Slavists, of whose ranks she is a prominent member, associates that dismissive view with a now-discredited Victorian fastidiousness in literary tastes, and argues the latter view, that Dostoevsky wrote deliberately and brilliantly in that “messy” and dauntingly “prosaic” style for which he is (in)famous: “Dostoevsky presents a translator with several problems. First, he is among the most ‘prosaic’ of prosewriters, with an outer ear well-tuned to the inefficiencies of spoken dialogue and an inner ear able to monitor long stretches of messy meandering yet somehow sense-laden processes of thought” (Emerson 1991: 309). Or again: “In general, English literary language tends to smooth out the colloquial speech markers in which Russian is so rich, those conversational binders and asides that account for so much of the unparaphrasable humor and delicacy in Dostoevsky’s otherwise rather forbidding plots. However appealing a ‘smooth lawn mowed in the English manner’ [Conrad’s description of Garnett’s translation] might be to Anglophone audiences, it is not Dostoevsky’s volcano” (Emerson 1991: 312). Or yet again: “Of course, if one feels – as Henry James and many lesser critics have felt – that Dostoevsky was not concerned with style, only with passion and a mass of powerful thoughts, then none of this matters. But if one assumes that many Karamazov characters, and its narrator as well, are designed to sound awkward, bookish, melodramatic, then not to smooth over or homogenize the text (however well that might serve the ideas) should be a priority in any translation” (Emerson 1991: 312). Or, finally: “A second feature of the text as a whole, one that very strongly marks the voices of characters as well as narrator in Russian and is usually severely attenuated in translation, is its choppy, inefficient, somehow redundant texture. This final quality, the novelist’s seeming ‘redundancy,’ is skilfully reflected in the Pevear/Volokhonsky version and the translators are right to take pride in it. For Dostoevsky was very calculating in his use of repetition. Although abundant, it is rarely the result of careless or lazy writing” (Emerson 1991: 313–14). This quasiforeignizing notion, that Dostoevsky’s genius as a novelist includes his willingness to risk readers’ censure for “bad writing” by making every narrator and every character “sound awkward, bookish, melodramatic,” by giving the colloquial speech of his narrators and characters a “choppy, inefficient, somehow redundant texture,” is picked up by Richard Pevear as well, as quoted and summarized by Emerson (1991: 316): “Our translation reflects a shift in understanding Dostoevsky as an artist,” Pevear explained in an interview with North Point Press. “Aesthetically, he was not understood at the turn of the century ... The older translations reflect misunderstandings; the translators would smooth out the writing, thinking, ‘Oh, he means this ... He’s just being careless.’ [But] he really was extremely careful.” Pevear believes that a translator’s first task must be to identify the “peculiarity” of Dostoevsky’s



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

departures from the norm. And then: “if you were going to deliberately make this mistake, how would you do it in English and in a way that is completely believable for English-speaking people and yet not drift away from the original?” Such “translator’s drift” occurs, Pevear claims, “when the translator decides, ‘Well, I know what that means and it means this.’” Drifting is dangerous, however, for “there are 20,000 ways to say anything, but the author wrote it only one way.”

There it is again: the assumption that people used to think Dostoevsky was just sloppy and careless, but we now know that “he really was extremely careful.” I submit, though, that for our purposes here – checking the evidence for Venuti’s claims regarding these two translations – the key question is not really whether Dostoevsky was a brilliantly innovative stylist who deliberately cultivated a “bad style” or else no stylist at all. There is, after all, no way of knowing which is actually the case. All we can do is assume one or the other – and our assumptions will tend to be driven by our ideological orientations to Dostevsky’s canonicity, which will in turn be guided by our hermeneutical dealings with our particular (academic or other) Lebenswelt. If, based on our dealings with Russians or Slavists who admire him, we want or need to assume that Dostoevsky richly deserves his canonical status, we will tend to give him the benefit of the doubt and come up with explanatory models that vindicate his style; if, based on our dealings with Russians or other readers who despise him, we want or need to assume that he is grossly overrated as a writer, we will tend to scoff at such vindicatory explanations and offer what seem to us obvious commonsensical observations that condemn him as irredeemably sloppy and unliterary. These would be competing metathematic interpretants, aimed at establishing or disputing Dostoevsky’s authority for his own literary style. Why would so many generations venerate his writing, the former metathematic interpretant pressures us to ask rhetorically, if he were really such a terrible writer? He is canonical. More than a century and a half after he began publishing we still read him, still write articles and books on him, still teach him to our students. Therefore, he is – must be – a brilliantly tricky stylist, representing the sloppiness of speech without himself succumbing to it. Why, the latter metathematic interpretant responds, would anyone so consistently, so habitually, over a literary career spanning three and a half decades, write so badly if he could write better? Yes, his passion is contagious, and the depth of his understanding of the human heart is impressive; but he wrote quickly, had little time or inclination to revise his drafts, and didn’t really care what his prose style sounded like, with the result that his prose almost always sounds as if it had been written by a freshman with no particular talent for writing. Therefore, he is – must be – no stylist at all, just somebody “with passion and a mass of powerful thoughts” and a tin ear who happened to get published over the course of the second half of the Russian nineteenth century.

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

There can be, needless to say, no principled adjudicating between these two metathematic interpretants. There is no appellate or supreme interpretant court that we can turn to, to settle this dispute once and for all. There never is, in literary matters. There is only the lower court of literary tastes – of competing metathematic interpretants – which can only keep wrangling. So while I am personally less inclined than Emerson to vindicate Dostoevsky’s style – no doubt we hang out in different circles – I am very far from assuming that the greater pressure I feel being channeled to me by some “bad stylist” interpretant through my own particular Russian Umgang makes me right. I want to base my reexamination of the Garnett and Pevear-Volokhonsky translations on three counterarguments to Emerson, but one of them is not that Dostoevsky is a weak stylist. My first counterargument instead is this: it is simply not the case, as Emerson seems to imply, that overly fastidious late-nineteenth-century and early-twentiethcentury readers mistakenly despised Dostoevsky’s style, but now we know better – “we” including basically everyone, or everyone whose opinion counts. The case is rather that the debate continues to rage. In their Rodnaya Rech’ (“Our Own Speech”), for example, Pyotr Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis (2007: 220) write: When rereading Dostoevsky one must not forget just how far from literature, strictly speaking, our great authors have dragged Russian word-culture. If you want this fact thrown in your face, try reading Dostoevsky slowly – something the writer himself desperately resists. No matter what phrase we tear out of the rushing stream of narrative, the gaudy film on the surface reveals the bare sackcloth underneath. What is thus exposed is a carcass stitched together from the debris of the cheap melodramas that Dostoevsky’s contemporaries produced for him in abundance. (my translation)

This is 2007: a far cry from the ancient history that Emerson and Pevear want to make the attacks on Dostoevsky’s style out to be. We can dismiss these writers’ credentials – they are Russian literary journalists, not professors of Russian – or we can argue about their conclusions – whether the “bare sackcloth” is a “deep-structural” feature of Dostoevsky’s writing that is “revealed,” like a rotting melodramatic corpse, from under the “gaudy film on the surface,” or whether the surface is the bare sackcloth and what is revealed underneath is a brilliant mimicry of “the inefficiencies of spoken dialogue” – but the inescapable fact is that intelligent and cultured native speakers of Russian are still rather vehemently attacking Dostoevsky’s style. Such attacks are not a now-discredited thing of the past. The question of Dostoevsky’s style seems to Emerson to have been settled, I would suggest, not just because she has chosen sides, but because her hermeneutical dealings with her institutional Lebenswelt as a professor of Russian have in some sense chosen sides for her – which is to say, channeled a powerful “brilliant



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

stylist” metathematic interpretant to her. That metathematic interpretant guides her to seek out, and seek textual confirmation for, recuperative explanatory models that construct Dostoevsky as a tricky, devious stylist who only imitates “bad styles” and is not himself a bad stylist. At a deeper level, I suggest, the metathematic interpretant that regulates Dostoevsky’s canonicity (his “authority” as a literary giant) guides a certain Slavist Umgang to a becoming-conscious inclination to venerate Dostoevsky, and thus to feel a “natural” or “instinctive” preference for positive over negative descriptions of Dostoevsky’s style, and for people (especially institutionally vetted authorities) who persuasively admire that style over people (especially “ordinary” Russian readers) who despise it. And let me hasten to say that I do not regard this collectively felt and disseminated institutional support for Dostoevsky’s canonicity as in any way an instance of bad faith. I am emphatically not condemning or criticizing Emerson or any other Slavist for any of this. We are all powerfully shaped by our hermeneutical dealings with the various professional and other Lebenswelten to which we belong – in this case specifically by metathematic interpretants. The big question in analyzing Venuti’s claims about Dostoevsky translations, I would argue, is not whether Dostoevsky’s “bad style” is what it seems to be or is actually a brilliant literary stratagem, but what the translator is to do about a style that even Slavists agree is at least superficially pretty weak. The reason I stress this is that I disagree with Emerson on another point (this would be my second counterargument to her claims): her implication that if you as Dostoevsky’s translator assume that he was a mediocre writer with a tin ear, you will naturally and almost inexorably become a translator like Constance Garnett, someone inclined to “improve” or “naturalize” him, whereas if you assume that he was a brilliant and “extremely careful” stylist you will become a translator like Pevear and Volokhonsky and reproduce his stylistic effects as faithfully as possible, or, in Venuti’s terms, “foreignize” him. The choices open to the translator, I will argue, are not this limited – certainly nowhere near this binary. And my third counterargument is this: I personally don’t believe that that the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation makes such a translational quantum leap past Garnett. In fact, I find the two translations uncannily similar, and, in terms of their representations of Dostoevsky’s “bad style” – whatever motives or literary failings or strategies we attribute to that style – both relatively timid. In other words, my brief is that Garnett doesn’t naturalize as strongly, nor do Pevear and Volokhonsky foreignize as strongly, as Emerson, May, and Venuti insist. To demonstrate this third point, I propose to take a close look at a single passage from the Grand Inquisitor chapter (Chapter 5 of book 5), in Dostoevsky’s original Russian and Garnett’s and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s English translations. I picked the passage more or less at random, looking neither for the key features of

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

Dostoevsky’s stylistic brilliance as identified by Slavists, as Emerson did, nor for a passage that would help me make some predetermined case – in fact I didn’t have one, when I started. All I really wanted, in fact, when I began looking, was an example of double-voicing, since I truly love Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky book, and generally Bakhtin’s approach to narrative voice – and I found one here. I originally believed, based on Rachel May’s analysis of Garnett’s “abridgement” of Dostoevsky’s narrative voice in The Brothers, that I needed two sample passages, one giving us Dostoevsky’s unnamed narrator, the other giving us one of his characters as subnarrator – Ivan in particular, my favorite – but as I narrowed the possible passages down, it became increasingly clear to me that there weren’t significant differences in the translations between renderings of the narrator’s voice and renderings of Ivan as “narrator” of the Grand Inquisitor chapter, so I settled on one of the latter. Obviously, here again, as in Chapter 3, there exists the danger that a close look at a single passage will miss more global trends. I have not done a close comparative analysis of the entire text of Dostoevsky’s novel in the original and the two translations; and my sense that this is a fairly representative passage may be simply false. In defense of my approach, let me say again that my case deals not so much with the “facts” about the two translations as with what we as scholars do with such facts, once we have done the research that generates them. My brief that the two translations are remarkably similar – not polar opposites, as for Emerson, May, and Venuti – is based on a close reading of this one passage; a detailed global analysis might turn up patterns of divergence between them that would tend to validate the binary Emerson, May, and Venuti impose on them. But I submit that the case I want to make about theoretical constructions of such evidence, and especially about the rhetorical interpretants that habitually organize such constructions, only circumstantially depends on my being right about the two translations as a whole. The evidence I derive from that one passage for a counterreading of the translation of literary classics – opposed to the notion that respect for a canonical author will tend to make a translator foreignize and contempt will tend to make a translator domesticate – seems to me fairly compelling, even if that one passage turns out to be wildly unrepresentative of the novel in Russian and English as a whole. And again, my own spot-checks suggest that it isn’t wildly unrepresentative. This is the passage:

– Я не совсем понимаю, Иван, что это такое? – улыбнулся все время молча слушавший Алеша, – прямо ли безбрежная фантазия или какаянибудь ошибка старика, какое-нибудь невозможное qui pro quo? – Прими хоть последнее, – рассмеялся Иван, – если уж тебя так разбаловал современный реализм, и ты не можешь вынести ничего€фантастического – хочешь qui pro quo, то пусть так и будет. Оно



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 



правда, – рассмеялся он опять, – старику девяносто лет, и он давно мог сойти с ума на своей идее, Пленник же мог поразить его своею наружностью. Это мог быть наконец просто бред, видение девяностолетнего старика пред смертью, да еще разгоряченного вчерашним автодафе во сто сожженных еретиков. Но не все ли равно нам с тобою, что qui pro quo, что безбрежная фантазия? Тут дело в том только, что старику надо высказаться, что наконец за все девяносто лет он высказывается и говорит вслух то, о чем все девяносто лет молчал. – А пленник тоже молчит? Глядит на него и не говорит ни слова? – Да так и должно быть во всех даже случаях, – опять засмеялся Иван. – Сам старик замечает ему, что он и права не имеет ничего прибавлять к тому, что уже прежде сказано. Если хочешь, так в этом и есть самая основная черта римского католичества, по моему мнению по крайней мере: “все дескать передано тобою папе и все стало быть теперь у папы, а ты хоть и не приходи теперь вовсе, не мешай до времени по крайней мере”. (Dostoevsky 1890/1963: 1.315)



“I don’t quite understand, Ivan. What does it mean?” Alyosha, who had been listening in silence, said with a smile. “Is it simply a wild fantasy, or a mistake on the part of the old man – some impossible quid pro quo?” “Take it as the last,” said Ivan, laughing, “if you are so corrupted by modern realism and can’t stand anything fantastic. If you like it to be a case of mistaken identity, let it be so. It is true,” he went on, laughing, “the old man was ninety, and he might well be crazy over his set idea. He might have been struck by the appearance of the Prisoner. It might, in fact, be simply his ravings, the delusion of an old man of ninety, overexcited by the auto-da-fé of a hundred heretics the day before. But does it matter to us after all whether it was a mistake of identity or a wild fantasy? All that matters is that the old man should speak out, should speak openly of what he has thought in silence for ninety years.” “And the Prisoner too is silent? Does He look at him and not say a word?” “That’s inevitable in any case,” Ivan laughed again. “The old man has told Him He hasn’t the right to add anything to what He has said of old. One may say it is the most fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism, in my opinion at least. ‘All has been given by Thee to the Pope,’ they say, ‘and all, therefore, is still in the Pope’s hands, and there is no need for Thee to come now at all. Thou must not meddle for the time, at least.’” (Garnett 1912: 259–60)



“I don’t understand what this is, Ivan,” Alyosha, who all the while had been listening silently, smiled. “Is it boundless fantasy, or some mistake on the old man’s part, some impossible qui pro quo?”

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

“Assume it’s the latter, if you like,” Ivan laughed, “if you’re so spoiled by modern realism and can’t stand anything fantastic – if you want it to be qui pro quo, let it be. Of course,” he laughed again, “the man is ninety years old, and might have lost his mind long ago over his idea. He might have been struck by the prisoner’s appearance. It might, finally, have been simple delirium, the vision of a ninety-year-old man nearing death, and who is excited, besides, by the auto-da-fé of a hundred burnt heretics the day before. But isn’t it all the same to you and me whether it’s qui pro quo or boundless fantasy? The only thing is that the old man needs to speak out, that finally after all his ninety years, he speaks out, and says aloud all that he has been silent about for ninety years.” “And the prisoner is silent, too? Just looks at him without saying a word?” “But that must be so in any case,” Ivan laughed again. “The old man himself points out to him that he has no right to add anything to what has already been said once. That, if you like, is the most basic feature of Roman Catholicism, in my opinion at least: ‘Everything,’ they say, ‘has been handed over by you to the pope, therefore everything now belongs to the pope, and you may as well not come at all now, or at least don’t interfere with us for the time being.’” (Pevear/Volokhonsky 1990: 250–51) 5.2.2 Comparison of a single paragraph By way of getting started, let us look closely at that first paragraph, which might be rendered literally: “‘I don’t completely understand, Ivan, what this is,’ smiled allthe-while-silently-having-listened Alyosha, ‘whether directly shoreless fantasy or some kind of mistake of the old man, some kind of impossible qui pro quo?’” The thing we notice immediately, comparing the two published translations to the Russian or my literal rendition, is that Emerson is at least partly right about Pevear and Volokhonsky’s attentiveness to Dostoevsky’s semantics, and thus also that Venuti is most likely right about Pevear and Volokhonsky foreignizing their Dostoevsky. First: “boundless fantasy” is a close translation of безбрежная фантазия bezbrezhnaya fantaziya; Garnett renders it more loosely as “wild fantasy.” Second: not recognizing the Latin phrase qui pro quo (mistaken identity), Garnett assimilates it to what she knows, quid pro quo (tit for tat), which is quite incorrect.32 Third: Garnett’s “who had been listening in silence” tacitly omits все время vsyo vremya “all the time/while”; Pevear and Volokhonsky reinstate it. We also notice, however, that Pevear and Volokhonsky have not given us an equivalent of совсем sovsem “completely, totally,” and Garnett has: “I don’t quite understand,” vs. “I don’t understand.” Just on a superficial first pass, then, the “sticking close to Dostoevsky” score is CG 1, P&V 3.



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

Looking again more closely, though, we note that “boundless fantasy,” while morphologically close to Dostoevsky’s безбрежная фантазия bezbrezhnaya fantaziya – the adjective there is derived from bez “without” + bereg “shore” – does not really get at the deeper underlying image in the collocation, which has to do with society’s implicit rationalist requirement that sensible adults keep their fantasies within bounds. It’s not just that the old man’s fantasies (possibly) have no bounds, but that they might exceed the bounds that decent people would expect him to impose on them. Thus a semantically more accurate translation would be something like “overflowing fantasy,” “unrestrained fantasy,” “unmoored fantasy,” or the like – or, obviously, “wild fantasy,” Garnett’s rendition. Volokhonsky’s morphologically meticulous “boundless fantasy,” which seems to compare the fantasy to the sea or outer space, subtly misses the point. With this rethinking, we’re even up: CG 2, P&V 2. Also, note that both translators tacitly smooth over Dostoevsky’s прямо ли pryamo li “directly whether,” which actually has the sense of “could it even be” or “whether it might positively be.” Both of our translations start that last sentence with the blandly standard – “naturalized” or “fluent” – “is it.” In this spot Pevear and Volokhonsky could have upped their foreignizing score, but gave it a pass. The other differences between the two translations are so minor as to be arguably irrelevant to Venuti’s argument. We could try to make a case for the “foreignizing” impact of Pevear and Volokhonsky’s shift from Garnett’s “Alyosha, who had been listening in silence, said with a smile” to the slightly more awkward “Alyosha, who all the while had been listening silently, smiled” – but as my literal translation suggests, Dostoevsky’s Russian uses an embedded gerund that is utterly unlike Garnett’s and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s nearly identical renditions. What shall we say, then, about the Pevear-Volokhonsky retranslation, based tentatively so far on this single paragraph? Is it truly more foreignized? It would not be difficult, I suppose, to make the case that it is; but neither would it be difficult to make the opposite case, that it is not strikingly different from the Garnett – that the infamous “fluency” of Garnett and the brilliant polyphonic foreignization of Pevear and Volokhonsky come off sounding more or less the same. One could also quite plausibly argue that the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation is here and there more unthinkingly literal than the Garnett, but not necessarily closer to Dostoevsky’s Russian. 5.2.3 Colloquialism As Emerson points out, Dostoevsky’s style is highly and even aggressively colloquial, packed full of “the colloquial speech markers in which Russian is so rich, those conversational binders and asides that account for so much of the unparaphrasable humor and delicacy in Dostoevsky’s otherwise rather forbidding plots.” These

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

“conversational binders and asides” are notoriously difficult to represent in English, and so, as Emerson also notes, Dostoevsky’s English translators tend to elide them. Toward the end of the second paragraph, for example, Ivan says: “Но не все ли равно нам с тобою, что qui pro quo, что безбрежная фантазия?” Literally that would be: “But not all is-it? equal to us with you, that qui pro quo, that shoreless fantasy?”; or, more loosely, “But is it not all the same to you and me that [it was] qui pro quo, that [it was a] shoreless fantasy?” Markers of colloquial speech there include (a) the opening word Но No “But,” (b) the use of a negative rhetorical question to anticipate an affirmative response, in не все ли равно ne vsyo li ravno “isn’t it all the same,” (c) the phrase нам с тобою nam s toboyu “to us with you” (meaning “to you and me”), and (d) the elision of это было eto bylo “it was” from что qui pro quo chto qui pro quo “that [it was] qui pro quo” and что безбрежная фантазия chto bezbrezhnaya fantaziya “that [it was a] shoreless fantasy.” The fact that (a) and (b) are idiomatic in English as well, while (c) and (d) are not, and therefore far more difficult to foreignize effectively, to my mind means that the signal test case for foreignization must lie in our translators’ renderings of (c) and (d). Garnett has “But does it matter to us after all whether it was a mistake of identity or a wild fantasy?”; Pevear and Volokhonsky “But isn’t it all the same to you and me whether it’s qui pro quo or boundless fantasy?” Of the two colloquial elements in the sentence that do work idiomatically in English, in other words, Garnett represents (a) and Pevear and Volokhonsky represents (a) and (b). We could argue over whether (b) in Pevear and Volokhonsky constitutes foreignization and its absence in Garnett constitutes naturalization – Venuti never looks this closely at the translations he classifies as either naturalizing or foreignizing, so it is impossible to know whether this minor a case would count – but as I say, when a source-text structure is easily and idiomatically transferrable to the target language, its use or nonuse in translation seems to me less crucial to determinations of foreignism. And as I say, since (c) and (d) are both specifically colloquialisms that English has no idiomatic way of reflecting, their absence from both translations would seem to me more significant for naturalization/foreignization determinations than the difference between “but does it matter” and “but isn’t it all the same.” My conclusion is certainly debatable, but I would submit that both translations naturalize here. The very next sentence in that paragraph begins: “Тут дело в том только” (lit. “Here the-thing [is] in that only”; or, more loosely, “Here the thing is only that”). Markers of colloquialism there include дело в том delo v tom “the thing is” and the word order that puts только tol’ko “only” at the end; also, the jarring effect of the repetitive sounds in том только (to-to) is typical of speech and suggests a very specific (apparently nonliterary or careless or radically colloquial) stylistic effect in the Russian. Garnett’s “All that matters is” and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s “The only



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

thing is” are both fairly neutral (unmarked) colloquial forms that do not draw stylistic attention to themselves as representations of quick, rushed, or “sloppy” speech. I suggest, too, that Pevear and Volokhonsky’s slightly more literal (and thus arguably foreignizing) “The only thing is” subtly but significantly misunderstands the Russian: “The only thing is” in English implies “the only problem with what I’ve been saying so far is”; Dostoevsky’s Russian implies “The only thing that matters is,” an implication that Garnett captures and Pevear and Volokhonsky miss. Here the peculiar nature of Pevear and Volokhonsky’s team-translating tells on them: Volokhonsky is a Russian linguist without the subtle ear for English that would hear the difference between “the only thing is” and “the only thing that matters is,” and Pevear has no Russian, so he can’t check his wife’s literal rendition against the original. But does this count as “recreating Dostoevsky’s peculiar style”? No, not exactly. Not only does “the only thing is” have none of the stumbling colloquialism of Dostoevsky’s Russian; it arguably doesn’t even mean the same thing. One of the most striking tendencies of Dostoevsky’s aggressively colloquial style is an unusually high density of intensifiers; as Vail’ and Genis (2007: 220) put it, he “never passes up a chance at a strong effect.” The stylistic impact of this habit in Russian can be likened in English to an emotional but careless writer italicizing every second or third word – and often italicizing awkwardly, inappropriately. For example, Alyosha asks whether the Prisoner, Jesus, just looks silently at the Grand Inquisitor, and Ivan replies, “Да так и должно быть во всех даже случаях.” Literally that would be “yes thus also should be in all even cases”; or, more loosely, “and precisely thus it should be, even in all cases.” The intensifiers there are да da “yes,” и i “and/also,” and даже dazhe “even.” None of these alone would be perceived as strange or excessive; all three of them in the same short sentence have an effect that might be rendered, parodically, along the lines of “and really, isn’t that exactly how it would have to be even in every possible case?” In this sense both Garnett and Pevear and Volokhonsky “improve” Dostoevsky’s style (if you think of it as “bad writing”) or “normalize” it (if you think of his profusion of intensifiers as a quirky and idiosyncratic but in no way deficient feature of his style). Garnett has “That’s inevitable in any case,” and Pevear and Volokhonsky have “But that must be so in any case.” If we think of “but” as an intensifier (as well as a perfectly meaningful conjunction), we might argue that Pevear and Volokhonsky add an intensifier, and so approximate Dostoevsky’s style slightly better than Garnett; but not much. 5.2.4 Polyphonic Dostoevsky What then of Bakhtin’s insistence that “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels” (6)? Yes, this is demonstrably true: in the passage under consideration too, as elsewhere, Ivan and Alyosha have different voices, and both voices are fully valid. This much is captured equally well by Garnett and Pevear and Volokhonsky, as by every other English translation I have examined. If this is “Dostoevsky’s polyphonic style,” Venuti’s claim that Garnett misses it and Pevear and Volokhonsky recreate it is simply false. What people referring casually to polyphony typically mean by it, however, is not this “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” that Bakhtin describes in his author’s note but precisely the merging of voices, or double-voicing: “In Dostoevsky’s artistic thinking, the genuine life of the personality takes place at the point of non-coincidence between a man and himself, at his point of departure beyond the limits of all that he is as a material being, a being that can be spied on, defined, predicted apart from its own will, ‘at second hand.’ The genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself ” (59). As I noted above, we do find that “dialogic penetration” of personality or voice, that double-voicing, in the passage we’ve been considering, but only at the end, when Ivan “quotes” some vaguely collectivized voice that is not the Grand Inquisitor and not Ivan himself but sort of both of them, and a few lines later is associated with (but not specifically attributed to) the Jesuits. Victor Terras’s note in his Karamazov Companion that “Dostoevsky knew Catholic theology mostly from the works of Slavophile writers such as F. I. Tiutchev and A. S. Khomiakov” (Terras 1981: 231) suggests that this “quotation” may have those Slavophile writers’ voices mixed in as well. In this light the “quotation” might be analyzed as consisting of Ivan channeling (a) nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox critiques of Catholicism and (b) Dostoevsky’s own strong sympathies with those critiques through (c) a second-person address to Jesus that (d) sounds very much as if it might have been uttered by the Grand Inquisitor in the jail cell but (e) is marked clearly as collectivized reported speech (дескать deskat’ “they say”), and (f) is later associated with the Jesuits, all (g) through Ivan’s “own” voice. This is indeed rich and exciting, and fully justifies Bakthin’s enthusiasm for Dostoevsky’s formal innovations. But note three things. First, the dialogical interpenetration of voices that Bakhtin celebrates isn’t everywhere at work in Dostoevsky; in this longish passage it appears only at the end, in a single sentence. “Dostoevsky’s polyphonic style” is not this double-voicing, though it includes it; it is the fact that Dostoevsky’s novels have characters with different voices. Double-voicing is a special case of polyphony, not its essence. And, as I say, Garnett and Pevear and Volokhonsky render “Dostoevsky’s polyphonic style” about equally well, and in very similar styles.



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

Second, however we explain them, the problematic aspects of Dostoevsky’s style that we’ve been discussing – its carelessly rushed colloquial quality, its unliterary flatness, its random and jarring rhythms, its overuse of intensifiers – are evident in that double-voiced or multiply voiced sentence as well. Look for example at “а ты хоть и не приходи теперь вовсе,” a great baggy monster of an imperative phrase whose pockets are full of intensifiers (а, хоть, и, теперь, вовсе) and can hardly walk for its clumsy rhythms. What the multiple voice channeled through Ivan’s speaking of the phrase wants to say, presumably, is “don’t come here at all,” or “just stay away”; what it gives us instead might be rendered parodically as “and so really you’d better just not come here now at all!” Whether we want with Emerson to say that Dostoevsky is brilliantly mimicking an awkward, mawkish, and verbose style, or with Conrad, Nabokov, and Vail’ and Genis that he just can’t help it because he’s such a mediocre literary stylist, it’s undeniable that this is an awkward, mawkish, and verbose line – and it’s also double-voiced. Double-voicing, in other words, may justify the superficial infelicities of Dostoevsky’s style, but it does not supersede them. And third, it would seem to me quite difficult to argue convincingly that Pevear and Volokhonsky render that multiply voiced sentence “better” – more closely, or more foreignizingly – than Garnett. The one possible bone of contention in the two translations is noted by Terras (1981: 230): “In Russian there is no special pronominal form used in addressing God and Jesus Christ. Hence the ‘Thou’ of this translation [by Garnett as revised by Ralph Matlaw] creates a tone somewhat different from that of the original.” The multiply voiced sentence at the end of our passage does have a repeating Jesus-addressed “you” in it, which Garnett does render “Thou” and “Thee”: “все дескать передано тобою папе и все стало быть теперь у папы, а ты хоть и не приходи теперь вовсе, не мешай до времени по крайней мере.” That is literally “everything they say [is/was] given-over by-you to-pope and everything came to-be now with-pope, but you although and don’t come-here now at-all, don’t bother/meddle/interfere before/until time at least”; or, more loosely, “they say everything was given over to the pope by you and everything came to be the pope’s, so don’t you come here now at all, at least don’t interfere before the [appointed] time.”33 Дескать deskat’, as I mentioned above, is an archaic indicator of free indirect discourse. In any case, Garnett renders that sentence “‘All has been given by Thee to the Pope,’ they say, ‘and all, therefore, is still in the Pope’s hands, and there is no need for Thee to come now at all. Thou must not meddle for the time, at least.’” Apart from the slight misreading there – “for the time” confuses the temporal dynamic of Dostoevsky’s original, which speaks of Jesus not returning до времени do vremeni or until or before the (appointed) time, namely the Day of Doom – there is the question of Garnett’s use of the King James religious register of Thou and Thee

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

and their affiliated archaic verb forms (dost, art, etc., though these don’t appear in this sentence). There would seem to be no source-cultural warrant for Garnett’s archaic religious diction in the Grand Inquisitor’s address to the Prisoner; the interpretant that guided her to use “Thou dost” in her translation was strictly targetcultural. And indeed Pevear and Volokhonsky correct this: “‘Everything,’ they say, ‘has been handed over by you to the pope, therefore everything now belongs to the pope, and you may as well not come at all now, or at least don’t interfere with us for the time being.’” “Thou” and “Thee” are replaced with “you”; even “the Pope” has become “the pope.” It would appear, then, that Garnett imposed a “false” (targetcultural) archaism on the Grand Inquisitor’s address to Jesus, and thus “naturalized” Dostoevsky’s text in English; and that Pevear and Volokhonsky have now restored this aspect of Dostoevsky’s novel to something closer to its original Russian form.34 What Terras misses, however, is that Garnett used a different Russian edition of the novel than he and other recent critics and translators did – specifically, a pre-Soviet one, before the Soviet editors removed the capitalizations Dostoevsky (1890/1919: 1.383) gave Ты Ty “You/Thou” (nominative), Тебя Tebya “You/Thee” (accusative), Тобою Toboyu “by You/Thee” (instrumental), Он On “He” (nominative), and Его Ego “Him” (accusative). Dostoevsky capitalized the pronouns referring to Jesus (You, He, etc.) out of his deep Christian devotion, to show respect; Dostoevsky’s (officially atheist) editors in the Soviet editions that are still authoritative today removed the capitalizations in order to diminish those pre-╉ revolutionary textual indications of respect for Jesus. Andrew H. MacAndrew’s (1970: 302) translation, for example, has “You” and “He,” which is actually closer to Dostoevsky’s original text than Pevear and Volokhonsky’s more obviously Soviet-influenced translation.35 It is also worth noting in this context that in Ivan’s “poem” of the Grand Inquisitor Dostoevsky is not even implicitly or allusively attacking “Christianity” or “the Church”; his critique is aimed at Western Christianity, here in the body of Roman Catholicism. Dostoevsky’s implicit defense of Russian Orthodoxy would have been strongly felt by his pre-Soviet Russian readers, not only because they too would have been predominantly Orthodox, not only because they would have been immersed in a culture intensely organized around ideological support for Orthodoxy, but also because of subtle but unmistakable cues in the text like the capitalization of “You” and “He” in reference to God and Jesus. This tension between Ivan’s explicit critique of Catholicism and Dostoevsky’s implicit defense of Orthodoxy would most probably have been felt less and less strongly by Russian readers throughout the Soviet era, in part due to precisely those subtle editorial changes made in the Soviet authoritative editions, “purifying” them of devout Orthodox markers. Today, as Russian culture flocks overwhelmingly back into the



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

Orthodox fold, Dostoevsky’s devout Orthodoxy may be increasingly palpable for his Russian readers; but as yet there are no “restorative” “Orthodox” editions of Dostoevsky’s work to help remind Russian readers of how Dostoevsky felt about specifically Russian Christianity. Pevear and Volokhonsky translated The Brothers before the Soviet Union fell; Emerson too wrote her 1991 review before the fall; May’s 1990 dissertation and its 1994 book form may be thought of as substantially grounded in the Soviet era as well. Venuti drew on Emerson’s and May’s analyses a good decade and a half after the fall of the Soviet Union – but of course, since he has no Russian, and therefore cannot check Brothers translations against either a pre-Soviet or a Soviet edition of the original, the historicity of his claims about the “fluency” of Garnett’s translation and the “foreignism” of the Pevear-Volokhonsky is largely a moot question. Another point that Terras misses is that Russian, like most European languages, has a formal-informal distinction in second-person pronouns – вы vy for the formal “you” and ты ty for the informal – that English lacks. And Alex. Matson is not the only translator from a European language into English who, feeling s/he needed an informal “you” to convey important social distinctions and tensions, has used “thou” and “thee” even in non-religious contexts – even when the “you” in question is not Jesus Christ returned to earth but, say, a big brother like Juhani. Given the strictness with which Russian culture still guards access to the informal “you” (my mother-and-law and I, for example, get along very well, with a high degree of friendliness, but I would never dream of using the informal “you” with her), it is somewhat shocking to the Russian reader to “hear” the Grand Inquisitor, a high official in the Roman Catholic Church, addressing a living Jesus Christ with the informal Ты. It is one thing to address God or Jesus as Ты in a prayer, as an imaginary person or voice in one’s head; quite another to sit in a jail cell across from Jesus and use a form of address that in normal police routines would signal contempt, the hierarchical power differentials between the jailer and the prisoner. So Dostoevsky uses the informal “you,” suggesting a lack of respect, but capitalizes it, suggesting respect: an interestingly complex mixture of addressivities that is extremely difficult to capture, or even to adumbrate, in English. Certainly Pevear and Volokhonsky’s “you” doesn’t begin to hint at those complexities. MacAndrew’s “You” and Garnett’s “Thou” don’t quite get us there either, but both, it seems to me, come closer than “you.” 5.3 Theorizing translation Rachel May (1994: 32) quotes Garnett writing in the 1940s to the effect that “Dostoievsky is so obscure and so careless a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

him – sometimes it needs some penetration to see what he is trying to say.” I suggested above that one’s agreement or disagreement with Garnett on this point is partly or largely determined by the professional Lebenswelt to which one belongs, and with which one has “dealings” (specifically, the metathematic interpretants channeled to one from that community): if one follows a certain Slavist Umgang in venerating not only Dostoevsky’s thought but his style as well, and explaining that style’s obvious infelicities as deliberate pastiches of sloppy speech, this attitude on the part of a translator is obviously culpable; if one follows a certain non-Slavist Umgang consisting of Russian and other readers who despise Dostoevsky’s style as “bad writing,” Garnett is simply stating an uncomfortable but undeniable fact. 5.3.1 The axiological interpretant But I now want to offer an ancillary explanation. Also powerfully operative in our reactions to Garnett’s negative take on Dostoevsky’s style is an ideological habitformation according to which the original writer is always by default a better writer than the translator. The original writer is a canonical writer, and therefore a great writer; the translator is the writer’s foreign imitator, instrument, or slave, and therefore by default a lesser literary light. When the translator is a canonical writer as well, as is the case when Nabokov translates Pushkin (or himself), we feel a certain uncomfortable cognitive and affective dissonance – we know, deep down, that the translator has to be a worse writer than the source author, but we also know that this particular translator is widely recognized as a brilliant writer in his own right. The ideological pressures at work in a situation like this are unresolvable, so we tend to suffer them in silence while the moment lasts, without rethinking them. When the translator is not a canonical writer – when the translator is, say, Constance Garnett, who has become a canonical translator but has nothing like the stature of a Nabokov as a writer in her own right – we are ideologically inclined to side with the author against the translator. I suggest, in fact, that we might describe this ideological imperative or pressure—the normative assumption, “performed and regulated” by both the source and target cultures, that the translator is by default going to be a weaker writer than the brilliant original author—as what Brafman and Brafman call “value attribution.” Or, modifying Venuti’s theoretical framework slightly, we might call it an axiological interpretant. In Venuti’s formulation, the axiological level was the reception phase of a translation’s life: first the metalinguistic, in which it is created by the translator; then the axiological, in which it is evaluated by the target audience. His formal and thematic interpretants work on both levels, guiding the translator’s work on the metalinguistic level and the target reader’s work on the axiological level. I am suggesting that we elevate the axiological from background



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

(passive) level status to active interpretant status: to the extent that “we are ideologically inclined to side with the author against the translator,” we are collectively guided by the axiological interpretant to feel habitually so inclined. Given the sway that the axiological interpretant will predictably wield over the target reader, in what Venuti calls the axiological level or reception phase, given also the resulting collectivized assumption that a canonized writer must be a great stylist as well, it seems not only likely but “normal” or normative that the translator who believes that she is a better stylist than the source author will tend tacitly to “touch up” the author’s style in translation – indeed will normatively ask herself whether she is willing to risk the target reader’s censure by deliberately rendering an awkwardly written classic text awkwardly, and respond (or feel inclined to respond) in the negative. This, mutatis mutandis, would be Constance Garnett; and my prediction that this translator will normatively “touch up” the problematic original is more or less Emerson’s prediction as well. The simple binary Emerson seems to impose on this situation would lead us to assume that the humbler and more submissive translator of a problematically written source text – the translators, say, who would consciously and even adamantly deny that they are better stylists than the source author – say, Pevear and Volokhonsky – would “naturally” or even “normatively” tend to reproduce the specific contours of the source text more faithfully (foreignizingly) in translation. But I suggest that this prediction is wrong – that in fact this prediction will tend to be effectively neutralized by the axiological interpretant. I submit, in fact, that the humble, submissive translator, faced with a problematic source text written by a canonical source author like Dostoevsky, will feel a powerful inclination (habitualized axiological interpretant) to assume, at some not-quite-conscious level, that the canonical source author must be a better stylist than s/he appears to be, and thus to render this author’s style in the target language with the felicity that the axiological interpretant inclines her to project preconsciously onto the source text. If this is true, it will be normative even for the humble and submissive translator unconsciously to improve the text in translation. To this translator – and I would argue that this translator is the ideological norm for literary translation – any attempt to reproduce an awkward source text awkwardly in the target language would normatively feel like an act of aggression against a brilliant classic. Given the wide dissemination and normative power of the assumptions about the canonized source author’s stylistic brilliance regulated by the axiological interpretant, it is rare for translators even to admit to themselves, let alone argue passionately to an acquisitions editor or a target readership, that they are “better writers” than the source author and therefore faced with the difficult (ideologically conflicted) choice between improving the source text’s awkward style or aggressively and arrogantly mimicking that style in the target language (what in

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

Robinson 1991: 167–91 and 239–49 I called “hyperbolic” and “ironic/aversive” translation strategies, respectively). Certainly the translator hired to translate a major literary classic by a major trade press with high expectations of course adoptions is unlikely to want to rock this particular boat, even less likely to make a strong case for aiming a radically denaturalizing translation strategy at a “knowing” elite – and least likely of all to get away with this sort of strategy. Even a translator’s note explaining that an aggressively awkward translation is faithful to the source text’s awkwardness is unlikely to have a significant impact in the face of normative assumptions regarding the source author’s brilliance regulated by the axiological interpretant: it will merely sound arrogant, and be dismissed as a transparent and pathetic attempt to justify and cover up professional incompetence. In Pevear and Volokhonsky’s case, of course, the decision to stick awkwardly to an awkward original is facilitated by Volokhonsky’s native Russian (and lack of native proficiency in English) and Pevear’s total lack of proficiency in Russian; but even they can’t bring themselves to approximate Dostoevsky’s style forcefully, despite Pevear’s explicit claim that the stylistic awkwardness for which Dostoevsky is famous is a deliberate and brilliant literary strategy. To the extent that their translation approximates Dostoevsky’s style, it does so extremely timidly, with only the tiniest and most heavily stylized hints of Dostoevsky’s awkwardnesses. (Venuti expresses surprise that the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation does not set off the kinds of alarm bells in “naïve” (non-elite) readers that he would expect a foreignizing translation to be ringing wildly; given the timidity of their “foreignization,” if that’s what it is, I don’t find naïve readers’ naturalizing response to the Pevear-Volokhonsky at all surprising.) Venuti has long argued that the purpose of a foreignizing translation is to denaturalize the translation as a translation, to strategically disillusion the target reader who uncritically thinks of himself or herself as reading the original; but he also recognizes in Venuti (2008) that such denaturalized/denaturalizing reading practices are extremely rare, and tend to be concentrated among a small intellectual elite capable of, interested in, and accustomed to reading the target text stereoscopically with the source text. I want to suggest, however, that there is a more complex translation-theoretical issue at stake here. As I mentioned earlier, Emerson’s and Venuti’s radical binarization of the translation field is based on an assumption – performed and regulated, I’m now suggesting, by means of the axiological interpretant inclining us habitually to assume the default greatness of original writers and weak slavishness of translators – that the weak translator believing the source author to be stylistically deficient will tend to naturalize and the strong translator believing the source author to be stylistically experimental will tend to foreignize. Those are the only two possible translation strategies, and in a certain elite scholarly Lebenswelt their



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

distribution is normatively hierarchical: foreignizing is superior to naturalizing; the foreignizing translator is superior to the naturalizing translator; foreignization is based on the more “accurate” (normatively humble or submissive) perception on the translator’s part that the source author is naturally and irrefutably the better writer and must be followed as attentively as possible. The habitual effect of this axiological interpretant and its concomitant ideological prescriptions, I suggest, is to render published translations normatively timid and more or less alike. It may in fact be because the Garnett and the PevearVolokhonsky translations are both so timid that I find them so similar: if I were willing to restrict the scope of possible or allowable translation strategies as narrowly as does the reigning cultural norm-structure (and, submissive to that normstructure, Emerson and Venuti as well), perhaps I too would see the Pevear-Volokhonsky as light-years better than (or even significantly different from) the Garnett. All other things being equal – i.e., discounting what in Chapter 3 I called the rhetorical situation of any given translation job, specifically here the marketplace constraints of which the skopos theorists write – I personally prefer radical naturalization or radical foreignization to the kind of timid naturalization that Venuti condemns or the kind of timid foreignization that he promotes. As a result, the two translations we’ve been looking at seem to me to be practically cookiecutter-identical. I have been criticized, in fact, for discounting those marketplace constraints in my published work on translation, largely because in a theoretical study aimed at other theorists, most of whom are translators themselves, therefore what Venuti calls “elite” readers, it is always possible – and therefore, some readers suggest, unrealistic and self-indulgent – to play fast and free with existing translation norms and constraints. It is harder, these critics insist – indeed flatout impossible, according to some – to indulge this sort of radically antinormative playfulness in the “real” translation marketplace. This is not the place to launch a detailed counterargument; let me just say briefly that, as one might expect from the normative nature of translational timidity, these critics’ claims are true in the aggregate but very far from true in every instance. Over the three and a half decades of my dealings with the professional translation marketplace or Lebenswelt, I have done numerous “timid” translations, in submission to the translation marketplace as narrowly and normatively conceived; but I have also been specifically asked by source authors to render their work more radically, and other translators (see Levine 1992, for instance) have reported similar experiences. When Anna-Riikka Carlson and Anne Rutanen, my editors at Avain, were in the market for a Finnish translator of my novel “SaarikosÂ� ki’s Spirits” (published in 2007 as Pentinpeijaiset), I specifically asked for a radically antinormative translator as well, and then worked closely with the translator

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

they found, Kimmo Lilja, reading and marking up two separate drafts of his translation, to make sure he wasn’t just timidly applying normative assumptions about translation to my book. This past summer I was hired by a Finnish novelist named Petri Karra to translate the first sixty pages of his novel Haarautuvan rakkauden talo (“The House of Forking Love”), which had been a critical and popular success in Finland and had been made into a movie by Mika Kaurismäki that was also a huge box-office success – and he specifically asked me to naturalize the sample translation radically, to globalize the characters and settings and above all make the translation work in English. He wanted to find an agent and eventually a publisher in the US or the UK, and didn’t want the novel to be perceived as parochially Finnish or even “Nordic.” As I got into the job, loving it, I wrote to him that I kept catching myself thinking of the novel as my own, and sometimes felt I was getting carried away, radically expanding his Finnish phrases with my own metaphors, even sometimes adding new images and whole lines to the translation – and he wrote back that that was exactly what he wanted. When he read the finished translation, he was ecstatic: he said it was very much like reading someone else’s brilliant novel, and that he’d had to keep reminding himself that he was (partly) responsible for this, that his name would go on the cover. It was, in fact, more or less the task I’d given Kimmo Lilja, and more or less my response to his finished translation. When Karra did land a US agent, and explained how I had translated the sample that sold him on the novel, the agent specifically said that any deal he cut with a publisher would be contingent on my doing the complete novel translation as well. I am, therefore, inclined to attribute the closely circumscribed conception most translators and translation scholars seem to have of “the translation marketplace” not only to a narrow Umgang with a narrow Lebenswelt, but to habitualized ideological pressures channeled to them through that Umgang by the axiological interpretant that defines the source author as naturally and inherently a better writer than the translator, and the latter as the submissive slave of the former. The practical economic “reality” that they describe exists, of course; but it is not the whole reality. It is only the reality that the axiological interpretant wants us to acknowledge. So yes, the two radical versions I offer up next might be a little difficult to get published, if I were doing a full translation of The Brothers Karamazov rather than a brief sample in a theoretical book; but ultimately, my own experience (Umgang) says, it’s just a matter of finding the right publisher, and then marketing the translation cleverly, and hoping it finds (or creates) its audience. Here for example would be a radically foreignized version of the passage we’ve been examining: “I don’t totally understand, Ivan, what this is,” smiled the long-silent listener AlÂ� yosha, “whether it is in point of fact an out-of-control fantasy, or some kind of mistake the old man has made, some impossible ahem qui pro quo!”



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

“Take it that last way, if you like,” Ivan laughed, “if, in fact, you’ve been so spoiled by contemporary realism that you can’t just stand anything fantastic. If you want it to be ahem qui pro quo, by all means, let it be that. It is certainly true,” he laughed again, “that the old man is ninety, he may just be obsessed with his idea, the Prisoner may even have just sort of struck him with his appearance. It may finally even be just plain delirious raving, a vision flashing before a nonagenarian’s eyes just before he dies, his imagination overheated indeed by yesterday’s auto-da-fé in a hundred burned heretics. But come on, isn’t it really all the same to us with you, in the end, whether it’s qui pro quo, ahem, or an out-of-control fantasy? The only thing here that matters is that the old man needs to spit it out, that finally after ninety years he coughs up and says aloud all that he’s silenced all ninety years.” “But the Prisoner also silences himself? Looks at him and doesn’t say, not a word?” “Well, truly and really it just has to be like that even in every possible case,” Ivan laughed again. “The old man observes to him that he just flatout doesn’t have the right to add anything at all to what was said before. If you like, so in this in truth is the basic feature of Roman Catholicism, in my opinion at any rate: ‘It was all (they say) given by You over to the pope, therefore it all now is the pope’s and not Yours any more, and so really you’d better just not come here now at all before the appointed time at any rate.’”

I’ve got some radical literalism in there, but also some strong attention to the specific verbal and nonverbal contours and textures of the Russian original, and far less willingness to naturalize them than either Garnett or Pevear and Volokhonsky showed. Rather than assimilating the salient features of Dostoevsky’s problematic – “bad” – style to timidly idiomatic English, as both of the translations we’ve been examining do, I foreground them, creating jarring rhythms, flat colloquialisms, and exaggerated (and here and there “off ”) emphasis. I also introduce a semiverbal vocalization (“ahem”) as a speech indicator just before or just after the Latin phrase qui pro quo, precisely because it is a phrase that is unlikely ever to be uttered by an English-speaker: it is primarily used by speakers of Romance languages (presumably nineteenth-century educated Russians picked it up from the French), who tend to say do ut des in place of quid pro quo. In a sense this “naturalizes” the foreign phrase qui pro quo in English, but what it naturalizes is specifically the sound or feel of someone saying in English something that English-speakers wouldn’t say, so that what we get is a semi-plausible staging of a foreign-sounding effect. I’ve never seen Venuti describe this sort of effect as a foreignism – as I say, he typically isn’t particularly forthcoming on just what does and does not constitute foreignization – but the tension between the unrealistic words and their naturalistic staging would seem to me close enough to the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt to count as foreignization (see Robinson 2008: ch. 5).

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

But note what that radical foreignism does not allow me to do: foreground Dostoevsky’s double-voicing. My rendition of the multiply voiced “quotation” at the end there is just as timid as Garnett’s and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s. A radically naturalized translation allows me to do more with Bakhtin’s “polyphonic Dostoevsky”: “What the heck, bro,” Alyosha finally says, after sitting there all along with his thumb up his behind. “Is this guy just whacked out of his skull, or what? Doesn’t he have clue one who he’s talking to?” “Whatever, dude,” Ivan laughs. “If that’s how you have to hear it, if that’s how warped your head is by realistic fiction, that you can’t take a little fantasy, be my frickin’ guest. And, you know,” he laughs again, “the old guy is ninety, so sure, he may be a little touched in the head. Maybe he’s dying, and only imagines he’s got Jesus sitting there in front of him in the jail cell. Maybe his mind is still overheated by the burning of a hundred heretics the day before. But does any of that matter? Isn’t the main thing the fact that he spills his guts, after holding it all in for ninety years?” “The main thing for you, you mean,” Alyosha says, “as the writer of the story. Or for Dostoevsky, for that matter, as the writer of our story.” “Sure,” Ivan agrees easily. “That too.” “But the Prisoner holds his thoughts in too, right?” “Of course,” Ivan says. “But see, that’s part of it: my old guy, the Grand Inquisitor, tells Jesus that he can’t talk. Not that he’s not allowed to, because he’s their prisoner, but that he can’t. You handed the keys to the kingdom over to Peter, the first pope, right?” “Who did?” “Shut up and listen. You handed it all over, back then, and so now you have no right to add anything to what you said back then. So what are you even doing here? Go away. And stay away, until the appointed time.”

If, as Bakhtin argues, Dostoevsky’s stylistic brilliance is his ability to make his uncharacterized narrator, his various characterized narrators, his characters, and his imagined readers all act on each other, so that their voices interpenetrate each other’s speech – what Bakhtin (1929/1984: 199) calls the active type of doublevoicing, or in my revised terms from Chapter 3, the first type – it seems a paralyzingly timid form of literary objectivism to relegate the translator to the gallery, behind the glass wall, doesn’t it? The translator unavoidably adds at least one new voice to the mix (see Robinson 2009); surely it’s a form of ideologically normative repression that will not allow the translator to use that voice, or to use it openly? All I’ve done in this radically naturalized version is to enter into the heteroglot play with voicing that Bakhtin argues persuasively is the true core of Dostoevsky’s poetics; the only plausible explanation for why the translator should not be allowed, even encouraged, to do this is that the axiological imperative restricts the translator’s participation to slavish representations of literary effects.



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

5.3.2 The (meta)formal interpretant The really interesting question for translation theory, though, it seems to me, is to what extent my brief analytical comparison of the Garnett and Pevear-Volokhonsky translations with the Russian original would have helped Venuti make his case that foreignization is preferable to naturalization or domestication. What I found, in fact, was that he was not entirely wrong: there are foreignizing impulses at work in Pevear and Volokhonsky. Along the way, however, I also found that the differences between Garnett and Pevear and Volokhonsky are not particularly widespread or substantial, and that the differences that do demonstrably exist between the two translations are not simplistically binary (“naturalizing” vs. “foreignizing”): (a) Garnett and the later husband-wife translating team both mostly naturalize Dostoevsky in English; (b) Pevear and Volokhonsky on occasion naturalize Dostoevsky more than Garnett; and (c) Pevear and Volokhonsky’s “foreignisms” or rough literalisms on occasion misconstrue the Russian original. Is this useful information for Venuti, or would it only have muddied the binary waters? The tentative answer I offered early in the chapter was that my findings would be most useful to Venuti if he were truly interested in enhancing a scholarly understanding of Dostoevsky and the problems and the history of translating him into English, less or not at all useful if his purpose is simply to sell foreignism – Venuti’s metaformal interpretant – to his readers. I now want to suggest that this tentative formulation is itself a bit simplistic, and to offer some ways of complicating it. First of all, the coinage “metaformal interpretant” carries the unfortunate implication that there is a significant difference between the formal interpretant that guides or regulates the translator’s work and a higher-order meta-interpretant that guides or regulates the translation theorist’s work – or even that the translation theorist’s relation to that higher-order interpretant is “meta” in the sense that the theorist mostly observes its functioning rather than being guided or regulated by it. This construction of a “metaformal” interpretant, and possibly of a “metathematic” or “meta-axiological” interpretant as well, would seem to imply that the translation theorist who is actually regulated by an interpretant is somehow deficient as a theorist – that Venuti, for example, is less admirable as a translation theorist if he can be shown to be “wielded” or “thought” by a Schleiermacherian interpretant, say, rather than getting on top of that interpretant like a pro wrestler and wielding the hell out of it. Implicit in this construction would be the assumption (shaped and regulated by what I called above a scholarly “methodological interpretant”) that a “good” translation theorist frees himself or herself from the regulatory power of the interpretant through one or more strategies:

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

– s/he draws on competing theorists to problematize, challenge, and undermine the theoretical hegemony of “the authorities” (the theorist’s thematic interpretant); – s/he tests interpretant-guided theoretical formulations against translation practice, either the theorist’s own or the textual or ethnographic evidence of such practice gathered and recorded or reported by others (the theorist’s methodological imperative); or – s/he is just so smart, such a great thinker, that s/he thinks her way free of the interpretant’s regulatory reach (what we might call the theorist’s intellectual imperative). But second, I would argue that what is wrong with this construction is not that it is unrealistic, but that it ignores or normatively represses the ways in which it is itself the product of regulatory interpretants at work on theorization. The assumption that a theorist must be able to escape the regulatory influence of interpretants is itself another interpretant, another regulatory influence on our work from various collective (ideological) sources. The normative assumptions (methodological interpretants) guiding that list of liberatory strategies that theorists should employ to fight free of interpretants – drawing on competing theorists, drawing on translation practice, thinking really hard in some kind of idealized isolation from affective and cognitive relationality – are again themselves regulatory interpretants that guide our work, largely below the radar of conscious awareness, in and through what I have called somatic response, the reticulation of shared evaluative affect through an Umgang with a Lebenswelt. What we like to think of as our laudatory freedom from intellectual constraints is itself almost always another form of intellectual constraint – or, as I would prefer to formulate that, not of constraint but of collective guidance, or “ideosomatic regulation,” or sway. Above all, the standard (read: hegemonic) assumption that the translation or other theorist should work in ideal freedom from proselytizing impulses, that the “true” theorist is always descriptive rather than prescriptive, exploratory and speculative rather than determined to convert the reader to a specific way of thinking or acting, is part of a modern liberal methodological interpretant conventionally called “value-free inquiry” that quite effectively blinds theorists convinced of their own freedom from value-driven impulses to the extent to which their conviction is itself driven by and remobilizes a set of collective values. If, as I believe, all human social action (including thought and speech) is organized and guided collectively by means of the reticulation through groups of shared evaluative affects, then the pretense of value-free inquiry can only be another value, another evaluative construct (interpretant) motivated and organized and guided by group affect.



Chapter 5.╇ Translating Dostoevsky, theorizing translation 

The signal implication of this expanded model of the interpretant for my response to Venuti on translating Dostoevsky is not only that his project of selling foreignism to translation scholars is theoretically entirely respectable – not a theoretical failure of any kind, not a culpable or despicable sellout to salesmanship, as the “value-free inquiry” methodological interpretant might construe it – but also that my dual project of testing his claims against the textual evidence and retheorizing the interpretant is not substantially different from his. Our values may differ – as my own translations of the Dostoevsky passage suggest, I rather like the formal interpretant of naturalization, and find aggressively exaggerated naturalization a far more effective (hypermimetic) strategy for denaturalizing the translation-astranslation than foreignism,36 and I am rather more strongly guided than he is by the methodological interpretant that assigns paradigm-busting power to a close attention to translation practice – but we are both “performed and regulated” by value-laden collective impulses, indeed by an open and unconcealed desire to convert readers to set of deeply held values. In that sense Venuti and I are indeed, as we were originally thought to be back in the early 1990s, theoretical allies.

chapter 6

Mona Baker on narratives 6.0 Introduction An “interpretant” as Venuti (2008) theorizes it is basically a collectively guided impulse that orients a translator or the target reader of a translator to a task – the “metalinguistic” task of translating or the “axiological” task of assessing a translation. In the terms I’ve been developing here, it is a channel of habitualized sway through which the “culture” (society, this or that sociocultural “system” as defined by Descriptive Translation Studies, the translation marketplace, etc.) organizes and directs work on translations. As a fundamentally ideological impulse it is complexly involved in choice, both swaying individual choice and in some sense “choosable” by the individual, though the decision to choose a given interpretant seems itself to be swayed habitually by or through the interpretant; but its sway may also operate under the radar of consciousness, so that the “choice” of interpretant may be made by the translator or target reader more or less unconsciously. This would tend to make it an interpretive construct that is also speculative, in the sense that the “chooser” him/herself may dispute it – as of course may other commentators. At a certain level of theoretical generality, this is precisely the project to which Mona Baker (2006) dedicates Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Approach as well. Like Venuti (2008), she is interested in guided choice – the ways in which translators and interpreters (as well as journalists, NGOs, and other political actors) make choices that are ideologically swayed by collective and to some extent unconsciously felt and channeled forces. The first thing to note about Translation and Conflict, in fact, is that its title is something of a misnomer. As the three keywords are sequenced in it, translation>conflict>narrative, they seem to imply that the book is primarily a study of translation as a form of participation in conflict, and that narrative theory is simply the approach Baker brings to that investigation. In fact the book is primarily an introduction to narrative theory as a guide to understanding political conflict in the world today; her presentation of narrative theory is only tertiarily illustrated with mostly journalistic texts, both translated and untranslated. As a result, the keywords in the title should probably be sequenced narrative>conflict>translation.

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

I say this not as a criticism but as an orientation: I too am primarily interested here in what Baker has to say about narrativity, as an extension or complication of the conceptual field mapped out by Lawrence Venuti under the rubric of the interpretant, or what we might want to call “interpretancy.” This is partly a pragmatic prioritization: submitting Baker’s application of narrativity to translation to the kind of unpacking, testing, and rethinking that I have undertaken here of Venuti’s application of interpretancy to translation would require far more than the four chapters I have devoted to Venuti. In almost every sense Baker’s project is structurally isomorphic with Venuti’s: both scholars seek to introduce a theoretical orientation to translation scholars for our future use; both devote far more attention to the presentation of their conceptual framework than to illustrating it, and almost no attention at all to the kind of analytical research that would generate textual illustrations that challenge, complicate, or even potentially undermine that framework. Both Venuti and Baker do modulate the theoretical frameworks they take over from other theorists in slight but significant ways; but both seem to conceive their tasks in terms of presentation and illustration rather than in-depth research or textual analysis aimed at radical conceptual overhaul. Again, this is not a criticism; in introducing their respective conceptual frameworks to translation scholars both are doing the field a great service, and it is entirely reasonable for each to leave the task of challenging and testing those frameworks to other scholars. That latter task is obviously the one I have taken on in this book, and given the fecundity of Baker’s contribution I would gladly expand and explore its implications in as much detail as I have Venuti’s (though even that latter is not yet adequate); it is simply a far more extensive project to challenge and test a book-length theoretical presentation than it is to challenge and test one presented at article length. As a result, I propose to limit my scope drastically and focus on the concept of narrative, shunting translation even more forcibly aside than Baker does. This chapter on Baker’s discussion of narrativity will, therefore, be little more than a preliminary and provisional theoretical response to her richly productive introduction – and will leave the testing of her application of narrative theory to translation to other scholars. Before I turn to the concept of narrativity, though, let me register Baker’s (ibid: 1) salutary conception of translation as inescapably enmeshed in geopolitical conflict: Wherever we happen to be in the world and whatever type of activity or profession we may be involved in, we now live and function in a climate of conflict that cuts across national boundaries and constantly forces itself on our consciousness. In this conflict-ridden and globalized world, translation is central to the ability of all parties to legitimize their version of events, especially in view of the fact that political and other types of conflict today are played out in the international arena and can no longer be resolved by appealing to local constituencies alone. This



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

book draws on narrative theory to examine the ways in which translation and interpreting function in this context and to explore how the discursive negotiation of conflictual and competing narratives is realized in and through acts of translation and interpreting.

“It also assumes,” Baker adds, “that translation and interpreting are part of the institution of war and hence play a major role in the management of conflict – by all parties, from warmongers to peace activists” (ibid: 1–2; emphasis in original), even when the translated and interpreted texts do not “directly depict conflict or war”, and even when they are “packaged as disinterested, abstract scientific theories,” or “as literary texts, cartoons, or innocent entertainment” (ibid: 2). She also notes, very much in line with Venuti’s remarks about “the axiological level” or evaluative reception of a translation, that “whatever the intentions of a translator or interpreter, there is no guarantee that their work would not ultimately be interpreted ‘against the grain’, because the uptake and meaning of public and conceptual narratives are always influenced by the specificities of their production and reception” (ibid: 43–44). In her one chapter (6) devoted exclusively to translation – or rather to a presentation of Erving Goffman’s frame analysis, as illustrated exclusively with examples from the world of translating and interpreting – she notes in passing that “where frame space allows them more latitude, translators, and to a lesser extent interpreters, can insert their own critical comments and glosses at various points. This will not necessarily be welcomed by all readers or listeners, nor indeed even be understood by some, but it does allow the translator or interpreter to signal their position in relation to the narrative in question” (ibid: 127–28). And she concludes (ibid: 128): “We each make our own decisions on the ground and have to live with the consequences. The main thing to stress here is that neutrality is an illusion, and thus uncritical fidelity to the source text or utterance also has consequences that an informed translator or interpreter may not wish to be party to.” This is overall a conception of translating and interpreting that is solidly grounded in ideological analysis and utterly congruent with the assumptions Venuti brings to the study of translational interpretancy. 6.1 Narrativity and interpretancy Baker tells us early on that “this book draws on the notion of narrative as elaborated in social and communication theory, rather than in narratology or linguistics, to explore the way in which translation and interpreting participate in these processes. Narratives, in the sense used here, are the everyday stories we live by, and indeed I will be using ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ interchangeably throughout the

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

book. One of the attractions of narrative is that it is a highly transparent and intuitively satisfying concept that can easily be understood by anyone” (ibid: 3). Because stories operate on so many levels, one of which – that studied by narratologists and linguists, in fact – is familiar to everyone, narrativity would indeed appear to be a much more transparent phenomenon than interpretancy. And it would be hard to argue with the proposition that this transparency is what makes narrativity as an explanatory concept more attractive than interpretancy: the interpretant is an abstract construct that is much harder to flesh out for a non-specialist reader than is narrative. But Baker’s actual argumentation repeatedly suggests that things are rather more complex than this. Her insistence in the quotation above on using social and communication theory rather than narratology or linguistics, for example, implies that what she is really interested in is not really “the everyday stories we live by” but “the stories behind the everyday stories we live by,” or even “the non-narrative organizing principles behind the everyday stories we live by” – principles that are arguably very much the same kind of abstract constructs as interpretants, and that might even be assimilated conceptually to interpretancy. Baker writes (ibid: 4): While narratology and linguistics tend to focus on one text at a time, the first mostly on literary text (and more recently cinema) and the second mostly on oral narratives, narrative theory as outlined here treats narratives – across all genres and modes – as diffuse, amorphous configurations rather than as necessarily discrete, fully articulated local ‘stories’. It is simultaneously able to deal with the individual text and the broader set of narratives in which it is embedded, and it encourages us to look beyond the immediate, local narrative as elaborated in a given text or utterance to assess its contribution to elaborating wider narratives in society. Narrative theory further allows us to piece together and analyse a narrative that is not fully traceable to any specific stretch of text but has to be constructed from a range of sources, including non-verbal material. In so doing, it acknowledges the constructedness of narratives and encourages us to reflect critically on our embeddedness in them.

Any one of those “diffuse, amorphous configurations,” it seems clear, any “narrative that is not fully traceable to any specific stretch of text but has to be constructed from a range of sources, including non-verbal material,” may in its “natural” state – before being reconstructed as a narrative by the narrative theorist – be only metaphorically a “story” or a “narrative.” It may lack most or all of the features that narrative theory associates with narrativity (see Baker’s Chapter 4): it may lack both temporality (4.1: may be a nonverbal state of mind or body characterized by intensity rather than duration) and causal emplotment (4.3: may not be plotted at all). “It” may “exist” in a dialogical rather than a narrative form, saturated with many conflicting interactive voices that the narrativizing listener or reteller, bent



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

on constructing “it” as a narrative, will have to reduce to a single tale narrated by a single (collectivized) voice. “Because the emphasis within the framework adopted here is on the power and function of narratives rather than their structural makeup,” Baker (ibid: 19) writes, “it is ‘the responsibility of critical analysis ... to construct texts from diverse fragments and then explain how interpretive communities are able to imbue those fragments with coherence’ (Ehrenhaus 1993: 79).” “Power and function,” of course, are themselves non-narrative concepts, which means that what interests Baker about narratives is itself not narrative; it is a “deeper” core component of narrative. Thus when Baker (ibid) tells us that the focus in narrative theory is on “the crucial fact that ‘narrative shapes people’s views of rationality, of objectivity, of morality, and of their conceptions of themselves and others’ (Bennett and Edelman 1985: 159),” she may implicitly be revising Bennett and Edelman’s formulation to suggest that what “shapes people’s views of rationality, of objectivity, of morality, and of their conceptions of themselves and others” is not so much narrative itself but that deeper core component of narrative that she identifies as the source or primary channel of its “power and function.” Baker (ibid: 61) writes that “both relationality (in Somers and Gibson’s terminology) and hermeneutic composability (in Bruner’s framework) mean that it is impossible for the human mind to make sense of isolated events or of a patchwork of events that are not constituted as a narrative” (ibid: 61) – suggesting that this second “feature of narrative” too (discussed in Section 4.2) is a feature not so much of narrative per se as of narrativization, a cognitive process that arguably includes as one of its primary constitutive forces what Venuti identifies as the interpretant. Thus when Baker, summarizing narrative theorists on temporality, insists that “the elements of a narrative are always placed in some sequence, and ... the order in which they are placed carries meaning” (ibid: 50–51), we might binarize that formulation into “sequence” (narrative) and “sequencing” (narrativization), and suggest that the former is the concern of narratologists and linguists and the latter is the true concern of social and communication theorists, and thus of Baker as well. If we once again note that narrativization is guided or swayed by collectively habitualized interpretants, we may want to insist that the “meaning” carried by temporal sequencing is similarly channeled into narrativization by the internalized collective habits wielding those interpretants. This slight theoretical shift in Baker’s formulations would also imply that “moralization” as an expanded evaluative term for the carrying of “meaning” is also governed by cultural habits channeled through interpretants: “Narratives always project a chronological end that is also a moral end, a purpose, a forecast, an aspiration. This is why narratives guide behavior and action” (ibid: 54). Or again: causal emplotment is “intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality” (White 1987: 14, quoted in Baker ibid: 67), and thus “emplotment allows us to weight and explain events rather

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

than simply list them, to turn a set of propositions into an intelligible sequence about which we can form an opinion” (Baker ibid). A useful paraphrase of this idea might be, then, that the cultural habits channeled through interpretants sway us to “weight and explain events rather than simply list them” and emplotment operationalizes that explanatory weighting, gives us a specific rhetorical strategy by which “to turn a set of propositions into an intelligible sequence about which we can form an opinion.” This revision of the narrative theory Baker outlines would also help us see that narrativization is only one of many affective-becoming-cognitive processes guided or swayed by interpretants. Others might include: – dialogue as theorized by Bakhtin (1929/1984, 1934–35/1981; see also Morson and Emerson 1990) – rhetorical identification as theorized by Burke (1950/1969; see also Hawhee 2009) – performance as theorized by Austin (1962/1975; see also Felman 1980/2003 and Butler 1990, 1991, 1997) – kinesthetic metaphorization as theorized by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1997; see also Lakoff 1987 and Johnson 1987) – the network as theorized by Newman, Barabasi, and Watts (2006; see also Barabási 2003, Watts 2004) Such a pluralized context for the study of human communication would militate against the exclusivity implied in such claims as “Narration is the context for interpreting and assessing all communication – not a mode of discourse laid on by a creator’s deliberate choice but the shape of knowledge as we first apprehend it” (Fisher 1987: 193, quoted in Baker 2006: 9; emphasis added),37 or “In social and communication theory, as well as in the work of some historians such as Hayden White, narrative tends on the whole to be treated as the principal and inescapable mode by which we experience the world” (Baker ibid; emphasis in original). That is, narration – someone telling or thinking a story, understood as a morally emplotted sequence of events – is one “context for interpreting and assessing all communication,” not the context. This would also imply that “the shape of knowledge as we first apprehend it” is not narrativity but interpretancy, some form of inchoate (culturally habitualized, politically unconscious) pressure from the group to impose a certain type of interpretation on experience. In terms of the Peircean model of the interpretant outlined in Chapter 2, in fact, we might want to say that the level or phase at which experience is narrativized would correspond to Peirce’s logical interpretant, the “final” or Third or synthetic stage, following the immediate or First emotional interpretant (which might roughly be taken as an indication of somaticity) and the dynamic or Second



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

energetic interpretant (which might roughly be taken to indicate kinesthetic performativity). First, somaticity; Second, performativity; Third, narrativity. In that kind of sequence, dialogue might be taken to be an alternative form of Thirdness, a parallel logical interpretant alongside narrative. In my Bakhtinian/Aristotelian/ rhetorical revision of that Peircean model at the end of Chapter 3, however, I argued that the interactivity of dialogue was the source of all interpretancy, operating at a preverbal and precognitive (affective) level in somaticity, emerging as image schemata, images, verbal and visual metaphors, and interactively constitutive performances in kinesthetic performativity, and finally taking the “logical” form of morally emplotted stories in narrativity. And in any case for Peirce this whole triad is driven by habit as the going-underground or becoming-automatized of past logical interpretants as Thirds that are then re-experienced as the Firsts of intuition, instinct, inclination, and the Seconds of experience38, so that what fuels the conversion of dialogue into narrative at all three stages of the emotional-energetic-logical interpretant triad is a complex collection of cultural (habits-becoming-instincts-becoming-experiences-becoming-)habits: Third Second First

Logical interpretant Energetic interpretant Emotional interpretant

Narrativity Performativity Somaticity

Habit Interactive social experience Instinct, intuition, inclination

If narrative or narrativization is essentially a “horizontal” or syntagmatic structuring of experience, then, implicit in Baker’s argumentation is therefore also a “vertical” or paradigmatic structuring, a methodological “moving down” through layers or versions or tellings of stories from the superficial (that studied by narratologists and linguists) to deeper and deeper strata, at which the “stories” become increasingly less obviously plotted and thus less obviously story-like. This downward movement is especially clear in her remarks on an article by Ben Masel about the current US-Afghan war as “the latest Opium War” (quoted in Baker 2006: 57–58): “how many layers of this new narrative we are able to penetrate, or appreciate,” Baker (ibid: 58) notes, “will depend in part on how familiar we are with the narrative of the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60.” Baker never theorizes these “layers” and the act of “penetrating” them, but I suggest that they constitute a mapping of something like the vertical or paradigmatic approach that is implicit throughout her argumentation. The layers Baker means here seem to be temporal/ chronological strata, older narratives constituting lower layers; but her emphasis on “narrative that is not fully traceable to any specific stretch of text but has to be constructed from a range of sources, including non-verbal material” suggests at least two forms of vertical stratification that implicitly extend the scope of narrative

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

theory beyond syntagmatically plotted narrative. The first is the connection with interpretancy that we’ve been discussing: one of the nonverbal sources of material out of which the interpreter constructs narrative may be an inchoate and atemporal moment of collectivized pressure to create a certain kind of narrative. Narrativity, in other words, doesn’t go all the way down. The second is that the palimpsest that emerges from the scholar’s attempt to “penetrate” successive layers of narrativity is itself only metaphorically or potentially narrativized. It is possible, of course, to organize the various layers of narrativity into a chronological narrative: first there were the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60 (Act I), then came the Opium War the U.S. is currently fighting in Afghanistan (Act II). It is equally possible to conceptualize the actual research sequence as a reverse-chronological narrative: I’m reading about the Opium War the U.S. is currently fighting in Afghanistan, and as I read about the present (Act I) I cast my mind back to the past (Act II), to what I know about the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60. That these two narrativizations of the “layers” “penetrated” by the scholar do not exhaust the possible modelings of that process, however, is clear from other kinesthetic metaphors Baker draws on to describe the complexity of these narrativizations: “Second, because narratives are dynamic, they cannot be streamlined into a set of stable stories that people simply choose from. Narrative theory recognizes that at any moment in time we can be located within a variety of divergent, criss-crossing, often vacillating narratives, thus acknowledging the complexity and fluidity of our positioning in relation to other participants in interaction” (ibid: 3). If the narratives in which we are “located” (or that we are collectively swayed to construct) in the present vacillate, diverge, and criss-cross, and the kinesthetic image-schemata organizing those metaphors suggest reticulated webs or networks rather than temporally/morally plotted narratives, surely the scholar’s “penetration” of historical or other “layers” of narrativity may be equally reticulated. Indeed, my formulation “I’m reading about the Opium War the U.S. is currently fighting in Afghanistan, and as I read I cast my mind back to what I know about the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–60” suggests very much the same kind of synaptic reticulation in the present as what Baker describes as “the complexity and fluidity of our positioning in relation to other participants in interaction.” 6.2 The somatic exchange I suggested in Section 2.4 that the cultural habitualization of interpretancy might usefully be envisioned as an affective-becoming-conative-becoming-cognitive (emotional-becoming-energetic-becoming-logical) economy in which the interpretants or regulatory pressures are reticulated through the group in the form of



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

mimetically replicated body states – body states staged outwardly on the (physically present or absent/imagined) body as facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures, postures, and so on, and simulated inwardly by the collective nervous system. Baker (ibid: 29) offers a powerful example of this reticulation, which I have called the somatic exchange: Ella Shohat, an Iraqi Jew whose family left for Israel in the 1950s and who later emigrated to the United States as an adult, describes the effects of rupture between her ontological narrative and the collective narratives available in the USA and Europe as follows:  ot all hyphenated identities are permitted entry into America’s official lexin con of ethnicities and races. I could see in people’s faces how this corporeally inscribed hyphen, Iraq-Israel, produced a kind of classificatory vertigo, with the result that the hyphen immediately disappeared into an assimilable identity: ‘Ah, so you’re Israeli!’ ... [I]n the United States ... our Asianness disappears, subsumed under the dominant Eurocentric definition of Jewishness (equated with Europe) and Arabness (equated with Islam) as antonym. Millennia of existence in Iraq are erased in the name of three decades in Israel. (Shohat 2000: 289)

Ella Shohat’s ontological narrative constructs or performs her as an Iraqi Jew, part of the specifically Asian Jewish diaspora, with “millennia of existence in Iraq”; when her family moved to the US, the “hyphenation” of Iraqi Asianness and Jewishness did not make sense to people, “produced a kind of classificatory vertigo,” causing them to reclassify her as an Israeli, and thus as an honorary European or even proto-Christian. How did she know this? She saw it in their faces. The puzzlement in their facial expressions staged outwardly a “classificatory vertigo” with which they were presumably struggling inwardly; and the Shohats “caught” it too, felt that puzzlement inwardly as a regulatory pressure, as an affective refusal of “entry into America’s official lexicon of ethnicities and races.” That vertigo in the Americans the Shohats encountered was caused, we may speculate, not just by the American/European/Christian “shared narrative” according to which Jews are European proto-Christians, but by the culturally habitualized affective economy that enforced the narrativization of stray data as that narrative. The Americans the Shohats met did not just tell themselves the story of Jews being European protoChristians, nor did they just believe that story; they felt it, as a cultural habit, a collective preconscious full-body phenomenology, an ideosomatized “structure of feeling” as support for their entire geopolitical reality-and-identity structure. Because the “feelings” – regulatory pressures, habitualized interpretants – that supported that story were continually being reticulated through the group at that preconscious level, their response to a datum that did not fit the story (namely,

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

Shohat’s Iraqi-Jewish family) was primarily affective, vertiginous, a casting not just of narrative coherence but of the deeply felt struts and supports of reality itself into disarray. Shohat calls this a “classificatory vertigo,” because it was the initial unclassifiability of a family of Iraqi Jews that generated the vertiginous feeling that was displayed on the Americans’ faces. In other words, we should not take the adjective “classificatory” to indicate that what was transpiring behind those puzzled faces was coldly logical or rational, a calm sifting through classificatory categories, an analytical comparison of the apparent fact of an Iraqi-Jewish family against an existing narrative database. Rather, in Peirce’s terms what was transpiring here was an undoing of the logical interpretant, a surprise – “surprise is very efficient in breaking up associations of ideas” (Peirce 1931–1958: 5.478) – releasing kinesthetic energy into a new immediate (not yet narratively reenergized) emotional interpretant. What Shohat sees in the American faces is panic – which lasts only a brief moment before the American somatic exchange rights itself, reorients itself, by reassimilating the offending sign (“this corporeally inscribed hyphen”) to the prevailing reality-and-identity habits grounding (logical) interpretancy. Now a rationalist or strict-cognitivist model of narrativity might want to insist that Shohat’s “I could see in people’s faces” does not really constitute evidence for the clash of conflicting narratives. For this sort of model, the only acceptable evidence of such a clash would be verbal; and even then the explanation that Shohat offers, that a shared/public narrative from one culture was conflicting with a shared/ontological narrative from another, would have to be regarded as “purely speculative.” Only a “narrative account” of that conflict would suffice as evidence. That is, Shohat’s explanation could only be taken seriously if someone actually said to her: “You see, here in America we think of Jews as basically Europeans, and as proto-Christians, so the idea that you’re Iraqi and Jewish is a little hard for us to process. We would, therefore, rather think of you as Israeli!” Rationalist communication theory can only explain – and therefore only understand, and therefore only allow – the one channel of communication, the verbal, the discursive; any other channel must be regarded as largely vaporous.39 A somatic approach to this same scene would construct it differently – indeed, could explain and so would completely accept and confirm Shohat’s reading of the Americans’ body language as evidence of cultural/narrative conflict. For somatic theory it is not simply that body language is legible: it is felt, in the sense of being mimetically simulated in the observer’s body and experienced as his or her “own” feeling. Confronted with Americans’ facially staged puzzlement, Shohat doesn’t merely interpret it as a sign of vertiginous confusion; she feels it in her own body. Her body replicates it. This is, in fact, the default somatic medium of assimilation, acculturation: newly arrived bodies feel the normative interpretancy of the local bodies, feel it inwardly, but feel it as confusing, as disturbing, because it conflicts with the



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

normative habits organizing the interpretancy they bring with them from their previous cultural situatedness or at-homeness; after an initial period of confusion and conflict, sometimes lasting years, they either adapt to it or develop effective defenses against it (or both). Body states in this somatic model are highly contagious, even viral. It requires significant expenditures of affective energy to resist the contagion. Indeed Baker (ibid: 32) offers several eloquent examples of that contagion too, from the world of interpreting: Translating and interpreting ontological narratives is often extremely challenging. One interpreter interviewed by the Access to Justice project team at the University of Durham, UK, described the impact of a child abuse case on her emotional well-being: I used to want to be in tears nearly every night. It was terrible. ... when he [deaf child] cried, I cried. When he shouted, I shouted. You know it’s very very upsetting – very upsetting. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever done in my life. And it’s awful because I had no-one to share it with.

And: Interpreters at the Truth and Reconciliation trials that took place after the fall of apartheid in South Africa were similarly traumatized by their exposure to very painful ontological narratives of victims and the accompanying narratives of perpetrators. I t has been a gruelling job of work that has taken a physical, mental and psychological toll. We have borne a heavy burden as we have taken onto ourselves the anguish, the awfulness, and the sheer evil of it all. The interpreters have, for instance, had the trauma of not just hearing or reading about the atrocities, but have had to speak in the first person as either a victim or the perpetrator.

“We have borne a heavy burden as we have taken onto ourselves the anguish, the awfulness, and the sheer evil of it all”: that anguish, that awfulness, the sheer evil of the apartheid regime is channeled affectively-becoming-cognitively through the bodies of the victims and the perpetrators into the bodies of the interpreters – and, presumably, on into the other bodies present in the courtroom as well, those conducting the trials as well as other observers. Baker’s comment is that the interpreters were “traumatized by their exposure to very painful ontological narratives of victims and the accompanying narratives of perpetrators,” and that seems a fair statement; I would only highlight the word “painful” there, and stress that a narrative can only be painful – and the pain it conveys can only have a traumatizing effect on people exposed to it – if the habitualized affective economy supporting and channeling it is highly contagious. Baker (ibid: 21) earlier notes that “when people invest very heavily in specific versions of a narrative, giving up or adjusting those

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versions could result in major personal trauma for them”: our somatic investment in (felt cultural habitualization to) specific reality-and-identity narratives makes any threat to the believability or acceptability or apparent reality-base of those narratives potentially traumatizing. This same investment makes cross-cultural encounters fraught with somatic threat as well: Ella Shohat in the United States must deal not only cognitively but at a very deep affective level with a massive and well-established threat to the ontological narrative in which she is fully invested. Our term for the somatic effects of this sort of threat is culture shock; and obviously, as I say, our terms for the gradual waning of those effects with time (and the shifting of affective investments to the new cultural regimes) include assimilation, acculturation, and resocialization. Translators and interpreters are almost invariably people who have come out the other end of that process fully at home in both cultures; but clearly, as the two examples above make clear, that intercultural assimilation does not protect them from culture shock. The interpreters may have felt at home in the linguistic source culture, and perhaps in other aspects of that culture as well, but the physical and emotional abusiveness of that culture remains alien and shocking to them. Contrary to Fisher’s (1987: 109; cited in Baker ibid: 153) notion that there are “transcendental values” that help us assess narratives,40 the abuse in these examples was presumably systemic and therefore almost certainly normativized. We may assume that the perpetrators of the abuse believed in it – that it was part of their affective regulatory regimes; that it felt right to them to abuse others. The fact that most groups do probably disapprove of such behavior, and indeed find it shocking and even traumatizing when they encounter it, does not make such disapproval a “transcendental value”; it simply gives its viral dissemination a broad reach, to be explained by the contagiousness of the “moral” somatic pressures placed on groups in an ever expanding periphery to adhere to it. Naturally it is attractive to the members of any group to believe that their values are not historically derived or culturally contingent but “transcendental”; and it is even more attractive to even larger groups to believe that “good” values like tolerance for difference and respect for human rights and human dignity are transcendental, and that there is therefore something sick, pathological, about groups that normatively promote hate-based violence. Fidelity to that abusive regime for the interpreters required far more than the simple accurate transposition of semantic items from one language to another that is posited by rationalist communication theories; it required a full-bodied affective identification with the speakers, both those victimized by the regime and those perpetrating its victimizations. This is the interpreting equivalent of Method Acting, according to which in order to act out a feeling one must feel the feeling, live the experience, be the body: it is not enough for the interpreters to reproduce the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the speakers’ utterances; they must resomatize



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

the speakers’ body states in their own, undergo a kind of traumatic habit-change to the abusive habits of the source culture. The “imitative” or “reproductive” quality of translating and interpreting is therefore, as has often been noted (see Fawcett 1990, Wechsler 1998, Lindsay 2006), closely connected with the performativity of drama, music, and dance – indeed is itself intrinsically a performance, grounding the interpretive recreation of a sign as a new sign (Peirce’s logical interpretant) in the full habitualized embodiment not only of emotion but of energetic interaction with the world. No wonder, then, that in translating a powerfully life-affirming literary classic the translator participates bodily in that life-affirmation – and that in interpreting the first-person narratives of systemic physical and emotional abuse the interpreter participates bodily in that abuse. Somatic regulatory regimes are constructed by groups, and we belong to numerous groups and come into close professional and personal contact with many others in the course of a day; as a result, we all have to navigate experiences of culture shock on a regular basis. As Baker (ibid: 30) quotes Erving Goffman: “In Goffman’s terms, the interdependence between ontological and shared narratives is a function of the fact that ‘societies everywhere, if they are to be societies, must mobilize their members as self-regulating participants in social encounters’ (1967: 44).” And by “societies” there Goffman means all groups, even groups of two – not just, say, large national or ethnic or linguistic groups. In this context in fact it may be useful to imagine foreignism, as theorized by the tradition running from Schleiermacher to Venuti, as a homeopathic dose of culture shock. The idea would be that ordinary L1-loyal monolinguals – stereotyped Germans for Schleiermacher, stereotyped Americans for Venuti, generally the group of “positive” cultural belongers that I theorized in Section 3.3.3.3 – resist putting themselves at risk of culture shock by refusing to learn foreign languages (even for good measure proclaiming themselves incapable of learning foreign languages) and refusing to travel abroad (or traveling only to five-star hotels in countries where “everybody speaks English” and you can drink the water); but because we multilinguals know that learning foreign languages and acculturating to foreign cultures is good for people, broadens the mind, teaches tolerance and relativism, and so on, we seek out ever new channels for smuggling carefully titrated forms of culture shock into the lives of the people who would rather stay at home, protected. By the same token, Philip E. Lewis’s (1985) conception of “abusive translation” would be translation as a homeopathic dose of the abuse experienced virally by the interpreters whose traumatic reactions to it Baker quotes above: just a little abuse, again carefully titrated, so as not to traumatize (but see Robinson 1997b: 132–77).

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

6.3 Rhetorical situation Baker’s book is organized loosely around the presentation of four different theorizations of narrative, by Margaret R. Somers and Gloria D. Gibson (Chapters 3 and 4), Jerome Bruner (Chapters 4 and 5), Erving Goffman (Chapter 6), and Walter R. Fisher (Chapter 7):



Chapter 1 – introduction to the book: narrative, conflict, and translation Chapter 2 – introduction to narrative theory: the status, effects, and political import of narratives Chapter 3 – a quadripartite classification of types of narrative, offered by Somers (1992, 1997) and Somers and Gibson (1994): ontological narratives, public narratives, conceptual/disciplinary narratives, and master or meta-narratives Chapter 4 – a quadripartite classification of features of narrative, as conceptualized by both Somers and Gibson (1994) and Bruner (1991): temporality or narrative diachronicity, relationality or hermeneutic composability, causal emplotment, and selective appropriation Chapter 5 – another quadripartite classification of features of narrative, as theorized by Bruner: particularity, genericness, normativeness, and narrative accrual Chapter 6 – an introduction to Goffman’s (1974) frame analysis: temporal and spatial framing, selective appropriation, framing by labeling, and repositioning of participants Chapter 7 – an introduction to Fisher’s (1984, 1985, 1987, 1997) narrative paradigm: coherence and fidelity as evaluative criteria for assessing narratives

Most of these taxonomies are implicitly rhetorical, deriving sorting criteria not from “the narratives themselves” as stable ontological objects in the world but from the act of constructing narratives, the act of narrativization. Thus in Chapter 3 the primary sorting criterion is not so much anything intrinsic to each type of narrative but who tells it, specifically the demographic size of the group that tells it: the individual (ontological), “the family, religious or educational institution, the media, and the nation” (Baker ibid: 33) (public), an academic discipline (conceptual), and a civilization or era (meta- or master narrative). In Chapters 4 and 5 the primary sorting criterion is the cognitive activity undertaken by the teller of stories in creating them: (4) imposing temporal order, relating events hermeneutically to each other, imposing a moralizing plot on events, and selecting only the data most appropriate and useful for the narrative; (5) “refer[ing] to specific events and people but nevertheless do[ing] so within a more general framework of ‘story types’” (Baker ibid: 78), working with the tension between normative expectations and the need for novelty or “breach,” and “‘cobbl[ing] stories together to make them



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

into a whole of some sort’” (Bruner 1991: 18; quoted in Baker ibid: 101). In Chapter 6 the story-teller frames, reframes, or rekeys various events at least implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, in proleptic interaction with readers or listeners. For example, Baker (ibid: 137) quotes several passages from Hale (1997), who “reports a tendency among court interpreters to raise the level of formality when interpreting into the official language of the court and lower it when interpreting in the direction of witnesses and defendants,” and notes (ibid: 138): “Hale explains this tendency as a form of ‘“empathy” with one’s audience’ (1997: 52), a natural communicative need to accommodate our listeners by adjusting our speech to match what we deem to be their expectations.” But throughout these first six chapters, rhetoricity as interaction between the story-teller and an actively subjectified audience in the Bakhtinian sense (where the audience’s anticipation of the speaker’s or writer’s contribution shapes what the speaker says or the writer writes) tends to remain mostly implicit. By and large the “rhetorical” criteria for the taxonomizing of narrativity tend to focus on the narrator, the story-teller; such rhetorical factors as context, purpose, and exigency feature powerfully in examples but are never overtly theorized; and the audience as an active participant in meaning-construction remains tacitly understood, but only rarely explicitly explored. 6.3.1 Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm This all changes in Chapter 7, which makes it the most interesting and useful of all for my purposes here. Fisher’s (1987) book Human Communication as Narration in particular builds a narrative paradigm for assessing our assessments of specific narratives41 out of rhetorical theories from Aristotle to Stephen Toulmin – with the result that Baker’s focus in her last chapter is no longer on the tellers of stories but on their audiences, their readers or listeners. Baker presents Fisher’s theories under two umbrella rubrics, coherence and fidelity. Coherence has three subcategories, structural or argumentative coherence, material or intertextual coherence, and characterological coherence; fidelity has two, the logic of reasons (traditional logic) and the logic of good reasons (the audience’s take on the pragmatic consequences of a narrative’s values). This paradigm obviously draws heavily on Aristotle’s tripartite taxonomy of logos, ēthos, and pathos, especially logos (structural and material coherence and the logic of reasons) and ēthos (characterological coherence42). Only pathos is missing, or, perhaps, only comes through in severely attenuated form, as the logic of (what we feel are) good reasons: like Aristotle himself, Fisher seems to be decently embarrassed about emotional appeals.43 Of course, despite his embarrassment Aristotle (4th Century BCE/1959: 2.2–11) also devoted ten chapters to a careful analysis of the emotions; the fact that

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

he considered emotional appeals to be the worst kind of pandering to listeners’ basest inclinations did not prevent him from studying those appeals in detail and teaching his students how to structure them. Interestingly, in illustrating structural or argumentative coherence, Baker (ibid: 144) gives us a narrative assessment that is explicitly and indeed insistently marked for emotional appeal, but that Baker herself thematizes purely in terms of its highlighting of logical inconsistencies: In an article in The Independent published on 15 July 2004, Robin Cook, a former member of the British Cabinet who resigned over the 2003 invasion of Iraq, criticized the outcome of an inquiry headed by Lord Butler into the events that led up to the war for what we might describe as a lack of structural coherence in Fisher’s terms:  esterday Lord Butler calmly pronounced the intelligence on which the war Y was launched as hopelessly overheated. His conclusions on this point are so irrefutable that even Tony Blair had to admit that Saddam did not have any WMD [weapons of mass destruction] ready for use. ... This must be the most embarrassing failure in the history of British intelligence. Yet according to Lord Butler, no one is to blame. Everyone behaved perfectly properly and nobody made a mistake. Poor things, they were let down by the system and institutional weaknesses. (Cook 2004) What Robin Cook was pointing out here are inconsistencies within Lord Butler’s own report; admitting that the intelligence on which the war was launched was highly exaggerated, the argument goes, is inconsistent with concluding that no one is to blame for this state of affairs. This critique says: we cannot subscribe to Lord Butler’s narrative because its own logic is seriously flawed.

Yes, certainly: there is this logical aspect to Cook’s assessment. What Baker misses in it, however – what Fisher’s pathos-free narrative paradigm helps her miss – is the fact that Cook’s evaluation and elucidation of logos-related problems in Lord Butler’s narrative are explicitly carried by pathos. Indeed he is not only careful to assess the emotional appeal of Lord Butler’s report on two levels – Lord Butler characterizes the WMD intelligence as “overheated” (and therefore, in a cultural tradition that associates emotion with irrational sway, as wrong-headed), and does so, in Cook’s assessment, in a “calm” manner (and therefore, in that same antiemotional cultural tradition, reliably) – but himself presents the logical contradictions in Lord Butler’s report primarily through the emotionally laden rhetorical strategy of sarcasm. He first registers the intelligence community’s embarrassment about their failure, then, noting Lord Butler’s calm exculpation of the embarrassed, heaps scorn on both them and their exculpator with the mock-pity of “poor things.” This is not, obviously, the “calm” analysis of logical inconsistencies that we



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

hegemonically associate with reasoned intellect, and thus with logos or “structural coherence”; it is hot, impassioned, an appeal to the reader’s emotions, an attempt to make the reader feel Cook’s moral indignation. Recognizing Aristotelian ēthos behind Fisher’s discussion of characterological coherence, too, helps us remember that the speaker’s character is not so much a feature of a text (as the term “coherence” might otherwise seem to make it) as it is an image projected by the speaker or writer “through” or “over the head of ” the text as a guide to (and/or implicit plea for) the audience’s trust. An ethical appeal is specifically an attempt to get the audience to think well of the rhetor, and thus to feel inclined to be persuaded by him or her. Fisher incorporates this rhetorical perspective into his theorization of characterological coherence, and Baker gives it prominence in her summary of Fisher’s conceptual framework: Baker (ibid: 149) notes that Ronald Reagan, the George W. Bush and Sarah Palin of the decade in which Fisher wrote his book, “made many factual errors, inconsistent statements, and clearly attempted to divert attention from relevant issues on many occasions (Fisher 1987: 145)” so that, “by the standards of the rational-world paradigm, Reagan should unequivocally be regarded as a poor rhetor. And yet, he was extremely popular in America and thought to be a great communicator; so much so, in fact, that ‘Reagan’s critics, like those who would criticize any heroic figure, discover that their characters rather than his come under attack’ (Fisher 1987: 148; emphasis in original)” (Baker ibid). Baker (ibid) comments: Fisher attributes Reagan’s success to the ‘coherence and fidelity of his character’ (1987: 147). But he also stresses that Reagan’s story was effective because it was consistent with the story of America, that it was ‘easy to identify him with mythic qualities and forces that are often referred to collectively as “the American Dream”’ (1987: 148). More specifically, Fisher offers three reasons for Reagan’s success:  irst, Reagan’s story is grounded in American history and it is informed by F central values of the American Dream. Second, his perceived character is constituted by this background and renders him virtually immune to ‘rational’ criticism. Third, the implied audience of heroes in his rhetoric is as efficacious as just about any that one might conceive, given our troubled times.  (Fisher 1987: 146) This means that characterological coherence, as conceived within the narrative paradigm, cannot be achieved in a vacuum; it is heavily dependent on the nature of the narratives that a character draws on to elaborate their own story, and on the resonance of these narratives within a specific historical and cultural context.

Both Fisher’s explanation of Reagan’s rhetorical success and Baker’s summary of that explanation first (and second) implicitly invoke Fisher’s notion of material coherence: the intertextual “question of how a narrative relates to other narratives that have a bearing on the same issue and with which we are familiar” (Baker ibid: 146). In other words, it wasn’t just the “coherence and fidelity of his character” that made

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

Reagan the “Teflon president”; it was also the fact that his ēthos invoked the more deeply habitualized (more culturally mythic) American public and master narratives on which it rested, out of which it arose, by which it was constituted. Reagan’s ēthos was complexly and multiply embedded in the mythic narratives by which “America” is constructed and maintained. And I think that initial formulation is quite right, as far as it goes. But then both Fisher and Baker seem to realize that it doesn’t go far enough, and push further, into territory not covered by the narrative paradigm Fisher is elaborating. Fisher’s third reason for Reagan’s rhetorical success observes that Reagan’s ēthos derives its power from his projection of his own “ethical” heroism onto his audience, which in turn (though Fisher does not say this44) is presumably so willing to project a heroic ēthos onto Reagan precisely in order to be able to continue participating in the projection of that heroic ēthos back onto them – a form perhaps of what the Brafmans (2008) call “the chameleon effect” – so that mythical American heroism seems to be reticulated through the entire rhetorical situation. And in her summary of this third reason Baker emphatically (with an italicized “and”) glosses it with the image of “resonance,” specifically the resonance of all the complexly embedded narratives “within a specific historical and cultural context.” It is an interesting question, of course, whether Fisher’s implicit image of the rhetorical circulation of social value through the group and Baker’s explicit image of resonance within a context are synonymous; since neither scholar stops to theorize, or even to reflect briefly upon, the image(s) s/he invokes here, it is difficult to track and compare the extension of the underlying concept(s). Whether this is a single concept or two, however, it/they would appear to me to be a sine qua non for the study of the rhetorical “success” of anything; and I propose to devote the rest of this chapter to an unpacking of it/them. 6.3.2 The warrant I propose to take a roundabout path to that unpacking, however, through yet another wrinkle in Fisher’s theory: the warrant. “The notion of good reasons,” Baker (ibid: 142) writes, “represents the core of Fisher’s paradigm. Fisher (1987: 48) defines good reasons as ‘elements that provide warrants for accepting or adhering to the advice fostered by any form of communication that can be considered rhetorical’ (emphasis in original). By ‘warrant’, he means ‘that which authorizes, sanctions, or justifies belief, attitude, or action – these being the usual forms of rhetorical advice’ (1987: 107).” The notion of “warrant,” of course, as Fisher (ibid: 44) notes, is Stephen Toulmin’s (1958: 98ff) key contribution to rhetoric – though his book was originally written as a contribution to logic, rejected by logicians as antilogical (too much attention paid to real-world variables45), and finally picked up by rhetorical theorists instead. In rhetorical and communication theory the warrant is typically taken to



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

be something like an individuation of the social or political unconscious, a marshalling of habitualized group norms, values, beliefs, assumptions, or expectations into organizational guidance for the interpretation of claims and their support. This is again, it should be clear, some kind of unconscious collective “force” or “agency” (“that which authorizes, sanctions, or justifies belief, attitude, or action”) that is highly reminiscent of the habitualized sway that is channeled through the interpretant – and that also bears a distant resemblance to the notion of “resonance.” If Reagan’s ēthos is difficult to challenge logically because it resonates within an emotionally charged social/cultural/historical/mythical context, perhaps that resonance is itself the warrant, or at least the emotional channel of the warrant (or possibly the interpretant), that authorizes, sanctions, justifies, guides, and/or sways belief. Toulmin originally developed his concept of the warrant out of a dissatisfaction with the logical straitjacket of the syllogism, especially the kind that moves from a singular minor premise like “Socrates is a man” through a universal major premise like “All men are mortal” to the conclusion “Therefore, Socrates is mortal” (Toulmin ibid: 108).46 The problem, he says, is that the logical form of the universal major premise – “all A’s are B’s” – obscures the complexity of a whole loose real-world assemblage of natural facts, disciplinary constructs, and general assumptions about reality that in practical argumentation among both experts and laypeople are rarely if ever reduced to the kind of absolute simplicity required by logicians. The warrant is his revision of the “universal major premise,” which logically serves as a transitional “guarantee” that enables our movement from the singular minor premise to the conclusion: since all men are mortal (the warrant), the fact or datum that Socrates is a man allows us to conclude or claim that Socrates is mortal. And, he says, so long as we think about the warrant in generalized abstract terms, we have no problems. The problem begins to arise when we consider the backing on which a warrant rests: ‘A whale will be a mammal’, ‘A Bermudan will be a Briton’, ‘A Saudi Arabian will be a Muslim’: here are three different warrants to which we might appeal in the course of a practical argument, each of which can justify the same sort of straightforward step from a datum to a conclusion. We might add for variety examples of even more diverse sorts, taken from moral, mathematical or psychological fields. But the moment we start asking about the backing which a warrant relies on in each field, great differences begin to appear: the kind of backing we must point to if we are to establish its authority will change greatly as we move from one field of argument to another. ‘A whale will be (i.e. is classifiable as) a mammal’, ‘A Bermudan will be (in the eyes of the law) a Briton’, ‘A Saudi Arabian will be (found to be) a Muslim’ – the words in parentheses indicate what these differences are. One warrant is defended by relating it to a system of taxonomical classification, another by appealing to the statutes governing the nationality of people born in the British colonies, the third by referring to the statistics which record how religious beliefs are distributed among people of different nationalities. (Toulmin ibid: 103–4)

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

He goes on to note that warrants and their backings could be adduced from any number of other fields as well; for our purposes, in connection with Baker’s book, it may be helpful to tweak Toulmin’s Muslim/Saudi Arabian warrant by holding up a datum like “X is a member of Jaysh al-Mahdi” and asking what conclusions “we” might want to draw from that, what claims “we” might want to make on its basis, and to that end what warrants “we” would need to articulate in order to make any given claim stick. Obviously, in uttering an enthymeme like “X is a member of Jaysh al-Mahdi, so he’s an Iraqi insurgent,” one would be relying on the transitional “guarantee” of a warrant like “all members of Jaysh al-Mahdi are Iraqi insurgents under the control of Muqtada al-Sadr”; and the backing for that would have to be grounded in US foreign policy, “the Iraq War” and “the War on Terror,” generally the cluster of ideological assumptions according to which the US represents freedom and democracy and goodness and light and anyone who opposes US hegemony in the Middle East or elsewhere is a terrorist or an insurgent, or more generally a force of darkness and evil. On the other hand, obviously, in uttering an enthymeme like “X is a member of Jaysh al-Mahdi, so he’s a loyal Iraqi Shi’a Muslim supporting his country’s effort to drive out the foreign occupiers,” one would be relying on a slightly but significantly different warrant – “all members of Jaysh al-Mahdi are Iraqi patriots under the control of Muqtada alSadr” – with backing now in the cluster of ideological assumptions behind Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement, which in almost every aspect are diametrically opposed to those behind the US-biased “insurgent” claim. Any attempt we might make to articulate a “neutral” claim about a member of Jaysh al-Mahdi – and there are many ways of doing so, constantly being sought by those members of the news media who still profess belief in neutrality or “objectivity” – would need to construct backing for the warrant out of the ideology governing liberal “fairness” or “not taking sides,” a position clearly recognizable by proponents of other “sides” as itself a “side” masquerading as objectivity. As Baker (2006: 128) says, “neutrality is an illusion.” What Fisher means by “warrant” is roughly the expanded sense in which rhetorical and communication theorists have come to understand Toulmin’s concept, something like “warrant plus backing.” Warrants for Toulmin (ibid: 105) are the “hypothetical, bridge-like statements” required by logicians in their analyses of argumentation – basically universal major premises – but typically not made explicit in ordinary practical argumentation. Explicitation of a warrant is normally only required when disagreement seems to arise out of conflicting warrants, as in the Jaysh al-Mahdi example above: “Well, you would agree, wouldn’t you, that Jaysh al-Mahdi is an insurgent organization?” “No, I would not.” “In that case we have no basis for a discussion.” “Exactly.” Because in practical argument both the warrant and its backing typically remain implicit, unnarrativized, and thus most



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

often part of the preconscious preconditions for a claim, it has seemed reasonable to rhetorical theorists to collapse them into the expanded term “warrant.” Now the noun “warrant” in ordinary English usage can mean a justification for a claim or a course of action, but I suggest that Toulmin borrows the name of his concept from the verb rather than the noun. The verb “to warrant” tends to take two kinds of subject in English, one a human being in a position of authority, with the power to authorize, certify, guarantee, or authenticate, the other an idealization or construct that is taken to provide justification for a belief or a course of action – and it is this latter agent, obviously, that makes Toulmin’s concept resemble Venuti’s post-Peircean and post-Ecoic interpretant and Baker’s “resonance within a context.” Typically the impersonal subject of the verb “to warrant” is a generalized conception of “the facts,” “the issues,” or “the circumstances,” a state of affairs constructed by the speaker as either intense enough – severe enough, dangerous enough, promising enough, weighty enough – or else not quite intense enough to warrant a certain kind of response. Typically also the relationship between the state of affairs and the response is established by the culture – there is a well-worn path from the state of affairs to the response, as from crime to punishment, from threat to retaliation, from the promise of future reward to the effort expended to attain that reward – but the culture also guides social actors to test each stereotyped state of affairs as it arises to determine whether it warrants the stereotyped response. We might, then, distinguish three different aspects or levels or phases of the warrant: 1. The warrant-as-proposition: Toulmin’s warrant, narrowly defined as the “hypothetical, bridge-like statement” or universal major premise that enables the logician to move from minor premise to conclusion or that enables the rhetor to move from the data to a claim 2. The warrant-as-circumstances: Toulmin’s backing, namely, the empirical state of affairs that we mean when we say things like “the facts don’t warrant such a claim” or “the circumstances don’t warrant such a response,” as if facts or circumstances had the power to decide whether a given response is warranted 3. The warrant-as-interpretant-habit: the societal guidance or sway that instills and regulates the social actor’s sense of the “proper” or “accepted” criteria for deciding to respond in the warranted way, and that thus both “writes” (1) and directs its rhetorical/logical use, and both constructs (2) and sways its empirical application It is important to remember, however, that the societal guidance or sway in (3) is not some preexisting mystical “force” or “power” that functions in autonomous isolation from individual human beings interacting in groups. In fact in somatic theory it is those individual human beings interacting in groups; it is that group dynamic. That

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

is to say, individual group members stating or thinking or vaguely sensing a warrant in (1) may be guided by group dynamics to construct that warrant in collectively regulated ways, and to project that warrant onto the facts in (2) along similarly ideosomatic lines; but their expressive behavior also channels or circulates that guidance to the other members of the group, so that (3) may come to feel like the byproduct of (1) and (2). Generally speaking, (3) consists of a reticulation through the group of the evaluative affects supporting (1) and (2); and that collective affective “support” for (1) and (2) is reticulated somatomimetically, which is to say not verbally, propositionally, discursively, “narratively,” consciously, analytically, but through the right-brain-to-right-brain communication of the Carpenter Effect (mirroring of others’ body language and simulation of others’ body states).47 In practical terms, this means that every time a member of the group utters a warrant (as a proposition and/or as a projection of agency onto circumstances), s/he mimetically reproduces the group’s ideosomatic guidance to and for that warrant in the dual through-put sense of both simulating the guidance in his/her own body and displaying the guidance on the stage of his/her body for others to see (and thereby mimetically simulate in their own bodies, so that the sway continues to be reticulated through the group). 6.3.3 Reticulatory resonance This is the basic model (see also Robinson 2008: ch. 1); now let’s return to Baker on Fisher on the complexly embedded ēthos of Ronald Reagan. Fisher, you will recall, wrote that Reagan’s ēthos is not only heroic but contagiously heroic, almost irresistibly heroic, because it is “grounded in American history and ... informed by central values of the American Dream ... [which] renders him virtually immune to ‘rational’ criticism”; and that “the implied audience of heroes in his rhetoric is as efficacious as just about any that one might conceive, given our troubled times” (1987: 146). And Baker encapsulated that reading by noting “that characterological coherence, as conceived within the narrative paradigm, cannot be achieved in a vacuum; it is heavily dependent on the nature of the narratives that a character draws on to elaborate their own story, and on the resonance of these narratives within a specific historical and cultural context” (2006: 149). The first thing I would observe about those two quotations is that the keyword “resonance” that I picked out of Baker’s passage earlier, and have taken as the noun in my section title here, itself “resonates” strongly with several keywords in Fisher’s passage: “grounded,” “informed,” “immune,” and “efficacious.” It is, obviously, nothing like synonymous with any of those; but we can feel among the various metaphorical images Fisher uses a certain affinity that also “resonates” with Baker’s term “resonance.” For Fisher, Reagan’s characterological narratives are:



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

– embedded in a (deeper narrative) history that is troped as the ground – lower and more stable – so that it too becomes stabilized, rendered more durable, less vulnerable to volatile shifts in its more immediate context (presumably the give-and-take of political life); – formed inwardly, as if by a potter’s hands, either by the values of the American Dream or by something else in the image of those values; – rendered immune to the “disease” of rational criticism by this grounding and this value-shaping; and – rendered efficacious (a term borrowed from Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca 196948), capable of producing an effect on voters, from Latin efficax “powerful, efficient,” ultimately from ex “out” + facere “to do,” by their reticulation of heroic images through the ordinary Americans who consume them. The Reagan ēthos, in other words, was immunized against the disease of liberal carping through its grounding in, and shaping by, American heroic mythology; and the “efficacious” reticulation of the Reagan ēthos through the American voting public (especially but not exclusively the right wing of that public) arguably reticulated that immunity as well, so that anyone who supported Reagan became not only effectively more heroic him- or herself but more immune to the sway of liberal reason. Baker, then, summarizes this complex in terms of “the narratives that a character draws on to elaborate their own story [and] the resonance of these narratives within a specific historical and cultural context.” By “the narratives that a character draws on to elaborate their own story” she means not only Reagan’s own ethical self-presentation but the heroic American mythical/historical narratives in which that ēthos is grounded, and by which it is in-formed. The “specific historical and cultural context” within which those narratives resonate is presumably American culture in a specific time period, the 1980s; and the preposition “within” must, I suggest, be taken to refer to the people living at that time in that culture. It’s not the “context” that resonates with those narratives, in other words; it’s the people within that context. In my somatic terms, the “narratives” that support Reagan’s Teflon ēthos are saturated with, and wield the regulatory force of, ideosomatic regimes; and the container marked off by “within a specific historical and cultural context” holds the fairly large group of patriotic and mostly conservative Americans that reticulates and maintains (and is maintained by) those regimes. Apart from the emotional resonances of the term “resonance,” this is a close summary of Fisher’s depiction. What “the resonance of these narratives within a specific historical and cultural context” adds to Fisher is a glimpse at the emotional channel through which narratives are grounded in other narratives, informed by values, rendered immune to reason, and made efficacious – something

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

Fisher himself does not hint at. Etymologically to resound is to sound again: the vibrations of one resonator (a string, an organ pipe) cause another nearby resonator to vibrate in sympathy with it, passing the sound-producing vibrations from string to string or pipe to pipe. In physics, any wave- or vibration-producing system will tend to resonate – oscillate – with greater amplitude at some frequencies than at others. This is the property that makes musical instruments possible (they are built to generate and amplify sound-producing vibrations at specific frequencies), but there is also the magnetic resonance (swaying) of buildings and bridges, the electromagnetic resonance (radiation) of radio waves, microwaves, visible light, x-rays, and so on. The primary figurative use of resonance tropes the emotions as resonators: the “vibrations” from one person’s emotions set another person quivering emotionally in sympathetic response, so that emotional resonance gets passed from body to body, very much as in the model of the somatic exchange – except that in the somatic exchange the neurology of such emotional resonance is troped mimetically as a “mirroring” or a “simulating” of body states rather than physically as the transfer of vibrations from one resonator to another. Still, Baker’s notion of “resonance within a context” might well be taken, mutatis mutandis, as a rough metaphor for the reticulation of evaluative affect through a group – especially once we’ve established, albeit tentatively, that implicit in the phrasing “within a specific historical and cultural context” is a group of people, namely the American voting public that supported Reagan in the 1980s. What Baker adds to Fisher, in other words, is an intimation of the somatic reticulation of stories and values through the populace – an intimation of the collective psychosocial “force” that might be taken to explain the various groundings, shapings, immunizations, and efficacies Fisher mentions. What, after all, does it mean for a characterological story or ēthos to be “grounded in American history”? Surely the only way that kind of grounding can conduce to the teflonization of a politician’s image is if the “history” it is grounded in is not a discursive history found in history books but the felt American history of the voters, a phenomenological history that may be partly discursivized (individual voters may be able to name a name or event or date or two) but is largely affective, largely a deep-seated feeling of America’s greatness, America’s triumphs, American exceptionalism. (One does not need to know that last term, or be able to cite a single event in support of it, to feel it as a mythical but politically powerful phenomenology.) The “ground” into which Reagan’s ēthos put its roots, therefore, or ran its ground wires, or however we specifically unpack Fisher’s metaphor, is history-as-feeling, specifically history-as-voters’-feeling. Baker’s term “resonance” adds a powerful specificity to an image left vague by Fisher: it is possible for the grounding of Reagan’s ēthos in American history to give it added power and



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

protection against criticism because it resonates emotionally with the voting public; because, somatically speaking, the group that supports Reagan is actively (though mostly preconsciously) engaged in the reticulation of positively valenced images of American history, engaged, that is, in the somatic sustaining of a powerfully felt myth of American history. The “central values of the American Dream” by which Reagan’s ēthos is informed are obviously the values held by voters of the American Dream: the fact that Fisher’s phrasing again elides the people in groups who are the only possible carriers of those values does not really leave it open to misconstruction. There simply is no other carrier for values than people, even if we sometimes speak as if they were carried by texts, or stories, or images: values are carried by texts or stories or images only in a displaced sense, once the constructive affective-becoming-cognitive work done by people in reading texts, telling or listening to stories, or visualizing images has been rhetorically “forgotten.” Since values are themselves arguably packets of collectively organized emotional resonance, the “informing” of Reagan’s ēthos with those values might equally well be thematized as a channeling of that resonance – even if we want to insist, with Fisher and Baker, that those values are also being narrativized (“the American Dream,” Reagan as “self-made man,” etc.) and that the resulting narratives are therefore ideosomatically resonant as well. And what is the tenor of Fisher’s “immunity” metaphor, if not the intensification of the ideosomatic resonance of the mythical heroism of Reagan’s ēthos to the point at which it damps and decays the potential resonance of countersystems critical of it? Not that stronger resonances necessarily have a damping or decaying effect on resonances that differ or disagree with them. It is possible, certainly, to support contradictory ideas or images ideosomatically: American conservatives, like the conservative supporters of previous “democratic” empires like the British, are perfectly capable of believing that the U.S. stands for democracy and freedom in the world and that the U.S. is the world’s rather violent policeman, called upon to suppress local unrest in various parts of the world with an iron fist. And arguably a liberal critic of Reagan who was appalled at the man’s politics and the gaffes and solecisms in his speech, but was nevertheless reluctantly impressed with and even attracted to the easy and contagious warmth of his grandfatherly persona, would have been reticulating contradictory ideosomatic resonances simultaneously as well. But for conservatives who were already committed body and soul to the mythic values of America, the grounding of Reagan’s ēthos in and informing of that ēthos by those mythic values did render it virtually scratch-proof. Finally, Fisher’s notion that American conservatives were happy to attribute mythical heroism to him because his ēthos so powerfully attributed mythical heroism to them clearly participates in the transfer of energy from resonator to resonator that is characteristic of resonance phenomena. This particular resonance

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

phenomenon is specifically rhetorical, but in a rhetorical mode that is not often recognized by students of rhetoric, although it is patently at work in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: the reticulation of social value through the group. This is especially clear in Aristotle’s use of doxa “opinion, reputation” and dokeō “I think, I seem, I pretend or feign”: what enough people think about me becomes my reputation, my social value, my “face,” and indeed may even come to seem like the objective truth about me, though the words doxa and dokeō clearly mark it as having its origins in opinion. If it seems to be true, the reticulatory cultural resonance of social value urges us to believe, it must be true. If believing that Reagan is a mythical hero allows me to believe that I am one too, and all Americans are, then it is going to feel powerfully attractive to participate in the reticulation of that belief – equally attractive, in fact, for Reagan himself as well, as for George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, who seem to be disturbingly free of the kind of cynical manipulation of heroic ēthos to swindle the American people that was typical of Lee Atwater (for Reagan and Bush 41) and Karl Rove (for Bush 43). How do warrants work in this reticulation of resonance? I suggested above that “the culture” – warrants as cultural habits channeling interpretants – might be seen as guiding its members in the narrativization or standardized sequencing of “the current state of affairs” (the syllogistic movement from minor to major premise, or what Toulmin calls the inductive movement from data to warrant + backing) and “the proper response to that state” (the conclusion or claim) as a path or trajectory, a plot. The simplest syllogism or Toulmin argument or “narrative” regarding Reagan would thus be something like – Reagan is an American hero (the singular minor premise or datum) – this vague sense of Reagan’s heroism is vaguely grounded in and shaped by mythical American history (the unstated but highly resonant universal major premise, in Toulmin’s terms the warrant plus backing, in my terms the warrantas-proposition plus warrant-as-circumstances, as guided narratively by the warrant-as-interpretant-habit) – we should support and vote for Reagan (the conclusion or claim or “response”) Apart from my reminder that any argumentative narrativization is going to be culturally guided, however, this simple formulation remains rhetorically unidirectional: based only on what the conservative American voter does in assessing the characterological coherence of Reagan’s narratives – which in a broad sense is the focus of Baker’s seventh chapter. Fisher’s three explanations for the persuasive power of Reagan’s ēthos in fact push us past that rhetorical unidirectionality: they indicate both (a) that the larger cultural grounding/shaping of Reagan’s mythic/ heroic narratives creates in his supporters immunity against liberal reason (“we” as Reagan’s conservative supporters do not merely assess his narratives but are shaped



Chapter 6.╇ Mona Baker on narratives 

by them, and are shaped in such a way as to provide us added defensive strength against the rhetorical/narrative onslaught of his critics), and (b) that the power of Reagan’s ēthos has a lot to do with his ability to project the heroism we project onto him back onto us (our response shapes his ēthos, his ēthos shapes our response, and the mythic heroism that is a signal ideosomatic component of “America” is reticulated among us resonantly). This more complex formulation thus involves American voters in at least three different rhetorical situations (interactions or somatic exchanges) simultaneously: [1] one with Reagan, in which he shapes us and we shape him; [2) one with Reagan’s liberal critics, in which the grounding and shaping force of (1) significantly improves our ability to ignore and silence the critical force of liberal reason; and [3] one with Reagan’s other conservative supporters, whose participation in the resonant reticulation of the grounding and shaping and immunizing force of (1) further strengthens our resolve to ignore and silence Reagan’s critics in (2).

Conclusion What are the consequences of adopting the fairly broad approach to translational sway suggested in this book? What difference does it make whether we understand translational sway narrowly and traditionally as a. restricted to error and bias alone, to be counteracted through rational regimes aimed at semantic and pragmatic equivalence; or more “mystically” (without an articulable etiology) as b. the influence of the source author (or, in translating certain sacred texts, the divine Source Author), source text, or source culture on the translator; or more “pragmatically” as c. a norm-governed professional chain of command in which a client and his or her agents (editors, project managers, researchers, etc.) spell out the conditions under which and the purposes for which the translator will work (this would obviously be the functionalist or skopos approach, to some degree reflected also in DTS); or ideologically as d. a shadowy collection of cultural habits (collectivized inclinations) channeled through interpretants and narratives? In a careful study of the English translations of Leo Tolstoy’s early Sevastopol Stories by Louise and Aylmer Maude, Susan Layton notes that the Maudes – Tolstoy’s friends, disciples, confidants, and preferred English translators – are generally praised for the reliability of their translations. Apart from the occasional problematic word choice – “An example is their rendering of смрадный as ‘heavy’ rather than ‘stinking,’ with reference to the air in a dugout where soldiers have just spent the night in ‘Sevastopol in August 1855’” (Layton 2008: 17) – the Maudes generally earn their “high standing as translators” (ibid). In several cases, however, Layton finds bolder and more controversial shifts that invite analysis along the lines of Venuti’s thematic interpretant or Baker’s conflictual narratives: To begin with the most meddlesome, their versions of “Sevastopol in December,” as of 1901, omitted significant material they incorrectly believed Tolstoy could not have written. Perhaps the Quaker Maudes found old Tolstoy’s pacifism so compelling that they had trouble imaging him as a patriot in his youth. He certainly fed their delusion. As Aylmer Maude put it in the first of his two prefaces to the 1901

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

translation, young Tolstoy had managed “to wring out of himself a few patriotic words” concerning the defense of Sevastopol. Maude continued: “What [Tolstoy]” was able to constrain himself to do in that direction was, however, not sufficient to satisfy the censor or the editor of the magazine in which the sketches first appeared, and the latter, on his side, added sundry patriotic touches. Knowing this to be the case, I selected certain passages which had a spurious ring and wrote to Tolstoy about them. His reply was: “With reference to the translation of Sevastopol, all the extracts you sent were either altered or inserted by the editor to meet the wishes of the censor, and it would therefore be better to omit them. The last extract quoted by you is especially abominable; it was added by the editor and displeased me very much at the time.” (“Preface to this edition” xv-xvi) (Layton ibid: 18)

Layton (ibid: 17) notes that the “especially abominable” sentence “cast Russia as the spotless victim of the Crimean War: ‘But at least it is heartening to think that we were not the ones who started this war, we were simply defending our country (родной край), our native land’,” and that Tolstoy himself deleted it from the fifth edition of his collected works in 1886, and began crossing it out of the early editions that he sent to friends and relatives back in the late 1850s, identifying it even then as written and inserted into the story by the acting editor of the Contemporary, the magazine that first published it in September, 1855. The other deletions made by the Maudes, however, are more questionable, because, Layton (ibid: 18) insists, “Tolstoy’s reply was unreliable. One need only consult his letters and diary of 1854–55 to verify his intensely patriotic reactions to the Crimean War. Furthermore, he had never before disowned any part of ‘Sevastopol in December’” – here Layton cites the detailed research done by N. I. Burnasheva (1999, 2002) on Tolstoy’s early work. “To all indications, then, we can put no credence in Tolstoy’s response to Maude’s inquiry about ‘spurious’ formulations. Tolstoy’s memory may have been playing him false. It seems equally probable, however, that this disavowal of patriotic passages was a prevarication, manifesting Tolstoy’s well-known practice of grooming his public image” (Layton ibid). One of the cuts the Maudes made was the second sentence in this passage, in Layton’s close translation: “Men will not accept such horrible conditions for the sake of a cross or rank, or because they have been threatened: there must be another, lofty motivation. That motivation is a feeling rarely manifested in Russians, a feeling that arouses diffidence in them but lies deep within every heart – love of the homeland” (ibid: 19). As Layton (ibid) comments, “By cutting that second sentence, the Maudes’ translation left a blank, for the reader to fill in: what exactly is the lofty motivation?” Layton also considers the Maudes’ translation of “Sevastopol in May,” which, she notes, “is almost perfectly faithful to its source, the War Stories text as emended



Conclusion 

by Tolstoy in 1886. But that faithfulness means the Maude translation is missing roughly eleven percent of the canonical version established by the [1932] Jubilee Edition” (ibid: 20). This becomes even more interesting, because the extra “roughly eleven percent” added to the “canonical version” consisted of material that Tolstoy himself cut before publication – according to the editor of the Jubilee Edition, V. I. Sreznevsky, cuts required by the censor, though according to Burnasheva the censor in the mid-1850s and after required no cuts. Rather, “Burnasheva has raised the possibility of ‘self-censorship’ on Tolstoy’s part, a decision not to say all he wanted to say, lest he suffer reprisals” (Layton ibid: 15). An example from this story: “Well, if we didn’t even have that much,” said the old and ever-dissatisfied lieutenant colonel, “the constant uncertainty we are living in – seeing people killed day after day and no end to it – would be intolerable. And to have dirt and discomfort added to it ...” “But our infantry officers live at the bastions with their men in the bombproofs and eat the soldiers’ soup,” said Kalugin, “what of them?” “What of them? Well, though it’s true they don’t change their shirts for ten days at a time, they are heroes all the same – wonderful fellows.” (the Maudes’ 1932 translation of the 1856 War Stories version; quoted in Layton ibid: 20) “Well, if we didn’t even have that,” said the old lieutenant-colonel, ever discontented, “things would be simply unbearable – the constant suspense, the sight of slaughter with no let-up day after day – just think if we were out there in the mud with no comforts.” “But how about our infantry officers,” said Kalugin, “living at the bastions with the soldiers in a bomb-shelter and eating soldiers’ borscht? How about them?” “Now there’s something I don’t understand,” said Prince Galtsin, “and, I must confess, don’t believe: that men in dirty underwear, crawling with lice and never washing their hands, can possibly be capable of bravery. You know what I mean, cette belle bravoure de gentilhomme – it’s just not possible.” “But they don’t even understand that kind of bravery,” said Praskukhin. “What rot you’re talking,” angrily interrupted Kalugin. “I’ve seen a lot more of those men here than you have, and I’ll tell you once and for all: our infantry officers may have lice and not change their underwear for ten days at a time, but they’re heroes, amazing men.” (Layton’s translation from the 1932 Jubilee Edition; Layton ibid: 20–21)

As Layton (ibid: 21) comments, “Such open expression of upper class contempt for social inferiors in the army is absent in the Maudes’ ‘Sevastopol in May,’ as it is in the emended War Stories version they used as their reference.” She adds (ibid): “Unfortunately for the translators, they apparently had not noticed that pertinent material had already been interpolated into ‘Sevastopol in May’ as published in Tolstoy’s collected works in 1928 in Moscow and Leningrad, just four years prior to the publication of the Jubilee volume.”

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

The most obvious question here is: what is the “true” source text? Layton and the Tolstoy scholars on whose historical work she relies, especially Burnasheva, trace the development of the Sevastopol Stories over close to a century and a half of new Russian editions, some authorized by Tolstoy, others (after his death) based on the fullest manuscript versions of the stories. And that raises the next question: what did the source author intend to be the source text? If Tolstoy censored himself, is the true intended source text the text he originally wrote or the text he originally published? Does self-censorship automatically invalidate a published text? If he disavowed certain lines in those stories early on and others much later, after his “conversion,” should we really take the early disavowal to be a “truer” or “more reliable” reflection of his authorial intentions than the later one? In terms of my tabulation above, we might want to say that for the Maudes, Tolstoy’s devoted disciples, translational sway was (b) a mystical and holistic force channeled to them from the godlike figure of Tolstoy himself, who was, of course, like any monotheistic deity, timeless and immortal. Whatever “old Tolstoy” felt and believed was obviously what Tolstoy had always felt and believed. How could he possibly have felt or believed anything different in his youth? He was, after all, Tolstoy. For Layton, by contrast, translational sway is (a) a form of error to be guarded against through careful scholarship. The Maudes were clearly swayed by their devotion to Tolstoy; a good translation would avoid such sway by adhering closely to the critically established manuscripts, implicitly accepting the textual products of painstakingly rational and analytical scholarship as constituting a kind of intellectual reconstruction of Tolstoy, a “better” Tolstoy than the real man ever was. And of course the intellectual reconstruction of Tolstoy that Layton presents in her article, derived from a long history of Tolstoy scholarship, is in a sense a series of Tolstoys, so that there is a significant difference between the patriotic “young Tolstoy” of 1854–55 and the pacifist “old Tolstoy” of 1901 – there is no question here of reconstructing a single monolithic “mythic” Tolstoy of the sort the Maudes might be presumed to be imagining. But the reconstructed “scholarly” young Tolstoy that Layton marshalls for 1854–55 is nevertheless a unified 1854–55 Tolstoy, a composite young Tolstoy, a Tolstoy who is as ideally monolithic for that period in his mid-twenties as the Maudean Tolstoy is for his entire life (and all time). The Tolstoy reconstructed as the author of the “restored” text included in the 1932 Jubilee edition is not the empirical Tolstoy who actually published the text; for a variety of reasons, some stylistic, others presumably political, that empirical (possibly self-censoring) Tolstoy deleted for publication many of the passages that the editors of the Jubilee edition ended up reinstating. The reconstructed monolithic 1854–55 Tolstoy is what we might call a “rationally mythic” Tolstoy, an idealized writer whose every stroke of the pen must be meticulously retained, regardless of what the empirical Tolstoy ended up doing, for what must



Conclusion 

seem to the Jubilee editors and Tolstoy scholars unworthy empirical reasons, like getting published and not angering patriotic readers. While the Tolstoy editors and scholars set up a “rationalist” resistance to what I’ve called the “mythical” project in which Layton’s reading suggests the Maudes were pursuing, then, at some level the two projects are uncannily congruent: there is a rationalist undercurrent to the Maudes’ project (they don’t just emend Tolstoy’s text according to their image of their master, but compare textual sources and get approval for their proposed changes from the author himself), and also a mystical undercurrent to Layton’s scholarly project (she assumes that there is a single stable “established” source text, deviation from which in the Maudes’ translation is culpable). In that sense I would offer a friendly amendment to Baker’s contention that the notion that there is (must be) a single stable source text (and behind that a single stable authorial intention) that “good” translators take as their basis for their translations comes out of a rational-world or objectivist theory of human communication. I think that’s true, but would add that there are mystical underpinnings to that theory. Positions (a) and (b) in my tabulation, in other words, are both mystical-becoming-rationalist constructions of translational sway – not least in the extent to which (a) mystifies rationalist anti-error regimes as based on purely logical and analytical procedures (painstaking historical scholarship and meticulous text analyses) and therefore guaranteed free of sway. To the extent that (c) functionalist/skopos/DTS approaches theorize sway at all, they tend to operationalize sway socioeconomically, as channeled through hierarchical interactions in which translators are constrained to act in certain ways by professional networks distributing the flow of texts and money. In practice (though this is very much an outsider’s view of what they do) this means that they tend to “suppress” discussion of the unconscious sway wielded by translation norms, for instance – “suppress” being a negative term for what these scholars would probably prefer to describe as simply not doing a thing, not being particularly interested in doing it. These are sociological approaches to the study of translation that are not greatly exercised by the social psychology of sway. The semiotic theory Venuti draws on and the narrative theory Baker draws on both posit instead that (d) every act of communication is swayed psychosocially by cultural habits not only to impose a collectively vetted interpretive order on texts but to perceive and portray that order not as imposed but as found. As the rhetorical revisions that I’ve been proposing to Venuti’s semiotic theory and Baker’s narrative theory suggest, this is not a robotic through-put from “ideology” or “culture” to “expression” or “meaning”; rather, every interpretive order that is imposed on any sign or any collection of signs will differ from every other, because different orderings are situated in different rhetorical situations. What Baker’s narrative approach to the study of translation would allow us to do with the Maudes’

 Translation and the Problem of Sway

translations of Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Stories, for example, especially once interwoven with Venuti’s theory of the interpretant and the kind of rhetorical perspective I’ve been offering here, would be to study the full complexity of this translation history, without tying ourselves to the mast of a single “canonical version” of the source text or stopping up our ears to the siren call of rhetorical situation. Obviously, any history becomes infinitely more complicated once we begin to look closely at ēthos, pathos, and logos, or at unstated warrants, or at the resonant reticulation of interpretants through a group; but this is, it should be clear, a salutary kind of complexity, a deidealized complexity, a complexity that is at least slightly better grounded in how human beings actually do things to each other with words than the mystical/rationalist/objectivist tradition would encourage us to recognize.

Notes 1

See Toury’s (1980: 57) discussion of “direct normative pronouncements,” which, he notes, “are already formulations of the norms, that is by-products of their very existence and/or of their activity ... Being what they are, these formulations should be treated with every possible circumspection, the more so because, apart from being partial and accidental, like any formulation of norms ..., they are likely to be afflicted with all sorts of biases and to show a clear inclination toward propaganda and persuasion, even if they pretend to be ‘objective’ (which they very often do).” What he is recognizing here is that any explicitation of a norm is likely to be biased, presumably due to the explicator’s membership in the group that supports the norm; but the corollary of that recognition would seem inevitably to be that as a byproduct of group membership the (often unconscious) practical application of the norm is equally biased. Thus when Toury (ibid) draws attention to the “wide gaps” that can often be found between “normatively formulated arguments” and “actual performance in translation,” presumably the continuum along which the gaps or differences lie is stretched not from biased to unbiased but from biased to supposedly unbiased (ostensibly “objective” but actually inclined to be propagandistic).

2

The New International Version, The Bible in Basic English, The Complete Jewish Bible, God’s Word Bible, The Hebrew Names Version, The Holman Christian Standard, The New International Reader’s Version, The Darby Translation, The Webster Bible, The Third Millennium Bible, The World English Bible, and Young’s Literal Translation, as well as the descendants of the KJV. Minor variations would include the New Century Version’s “lift the cover off his feet.”

3

See for example the rare moments in his otherwise calm, neutral, “scientific” discussion of different translation strategies in Nida (1964: 21) when he lets his passionate dislike of literalism shine through: when he quotes 2 Corinthians 3:10 in the 1881 English Revised Version and 1901 American Standard Version, for example, “For verily that which hath been made glorious hath not been made glorious in this respect, by reason of the glory that surpasseth,” and notes that “the words may be English, but the grammar is not; and the sense is quite lacking.”

4

Chapter 8 revolves around David Kantor’s (1976) research into the group dynamics of family relationships, which he finds to be organized and motivated around the playing of four key roles: the initiator, the blocker, the supporter, and the observer. Initiators get things started, come up with the new ideas and provide the enthusiasm that galvanizes the others into action; blockers thwart and obstruct new initiatives; supporters go along; observers watch passively, at most commenting on what they see happening. The Brafmans’ (2008: 168) conclusion in the chapter, and in the book as a whole, is that when “sway” is the initiator, it is essential for us to have some sort of rational blocker that reduces our susceptibility to sway’s largely unconscious initiatives. “It’s natural to want to dismiss a blocker’s naysaying,” they note, “but as we’ve seen, a dissenting voice – even an incompetent one – can often act as the dam that holds back a flood of irrational behavior.”

 Translation and the Problem of Sway 5

Toury moves to something like this more fluid understanding of the various “constraints” on translation in his mid-1990s revision of this 1976 essay for inclusion as Chapter 2 in Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. Retaining the basic conceptual framework introduced in the earlier version of the essay – the “performance instructions” (Toury 1995: 55) as well as the sliding middle ground between “relatively absolute rules, on the one hand, and pure idiosyncrasies on the other” – he also gives that middle ground a fuller “sliding” articulation than in 1976 (ibid: 54): Between these two poles lies a vast middle-ground occupied by intersubjective factors commonly designated norms. The norms themselves form a graded continuum along the scale: some are stronger, and hence more rule-like, others are weaker, and hence almost idiosyncratic. The borderlines between the various types of constraints are thus diffuse. Each of the concepts, including the grading itself, is relative too. Thus, what is just a favoured mode of behavior within a certain (more homogeneous) section thereof, in terms of either human agents (e.g., translators among texters in general) or types of activity (e.g., interpreting, or legal translation, within translation at large). Along the temporal axis, each type of constraint may, and often does move into its neighbouring domain(s) through processes of rise and decline. Thus, mere whims may catch on and become more and more normative, and norms can gain so much validity that, for all practical purposes, they become as binding as rules; or the other way around, of course. Shifts of validity and force often have to do with changes of status within a society. In fact, they can always be described in connection with the notion of norm, i.e., actually become norms. The other two types of constraints may even be redefined in terms of norms: rules as ‘[more] objective’, idiosyncrasies as ‘[more] subjective [or: less intersubjective]’ norms. See also my critique of Toury’s norm theory in Robinson (2003: 82–91). 6

“In all cases,” Peirce writes of the interpretant in 1907, “it includes feelings; for there must, at least, be a sense of comprehending the meaning of the sign. If it includes more than mere feeling, it must evoke some kind of effort. It may include something besides, which, for the present, may be vaguely called ‘thought’. I term these three kinds of interpretants the ‘emotional’, the ‘energetic’, and the ‘logical’ interpretants” (1998: 409). See also another 1907 formulation (Peirce 1931–1958: 5.475–76): The first proper significate effect of a sign is a feeling produced by it. There is almost always a feeling which we come to interpret as evidence that we comprehend the proper effect of the sign, although the foundation of truth in this is frequently very slight. This “emotional interpretant,” as I call it, may amount to much more than that feeling of recognition; and in some cases, it is the only proper significate effect that the sign produces. Thus, the performance of a piece of concerted music is a sign. It conveys, and is intended to convey, the composer’s musical ideas; but these usually consist merely of a series of feelings. If a sign produces any further proper significate effect, it will do so through the mediation of the emotional interpretant, and such further effect will always involve an effort. I call it the energetic interpretant. The effort may be a muscular one, as it is in the case of the command to ground arms; but it is much more usually an exertion upon the Inner World, a mental effort. It never can be the meaning of an intellectual concept, since it is a single act, [while] such a concept is of a general nature. But what further kind of effect can there be?



Notes  In advance of ascertaining the nature of this effect, it will be convenient to adopt a designation for it, and I will call it the logical interpretant, without as yet determining whether this term shall extent to anything beside the meaning of a general concept, though certainly closely related to that, or not. Shall we say that this effect may be a thought, that is to say, a mental sign? No doubt, it may be so; only, if this sign be of an intellectual kind – as it would have to be – it must itself have a logical interpretant; so that it cannot be the ultimate logical interpretant of the concept. Short (2004) offers an extraordinarily useful history of Peirce’s thinking on the sign, interpretation, and interpretants. 7

The Peircean idea that Lacan called the signifying chain, one of the master concepts of (post) structuralism, was in fact Peirce’s first definition of the interpretant, from 1866, at age 27. As Short (2004: 215) notes, this is “the thesis that characterizes the early period of Peirce’s semeiotic thought and that was dramatically reversed in his later years: that in every case the interpretant of a sign is another sign of the same object.” Short (ibid: 221) suggests that Peirce’s first discovery that the “signifying chain” is not only insufficient but unnecessary was the dynamic Secondness of the indexical sign, which connects cognition to an object by pointing at it; “thus, a cognition does not have to be the interpretant of a preceding cognition in order to have an object.” Short (ibid) continues: “In his 1903 Harvard ‘Lectures on Pragmatism,’ Peirce described the ‘perceptual judgment’ as ‘the first judgment of a person as to what is before his senses’ (CP 5.115, my emphasis). This is as clear a rejection of his earlier view – that there is no first cognition but that every cognition interprets a preceding cognition – as one could wish.” And, Short (ibid: 225–26) adds, Peirce’s realization beginning in 1896 (and most emphatically beginning in 1902) that significance arises not out of actual but potential interpretation (interpretability) meant that it is “its being interpretable, and not its being interpreted, that makes something a sign. It follows that an infinite progressus of actual thought-signs, each interpreting the preceding, is unnecessary. Just as a particular act of thinking can begin with a bang, so also it can end that way: in it, there can be a last as well as a first thought.” The pragmati(ci)sm that makes this realization possible is, perhaps, alien to the Continental tradition that canonized the signifying chain.

8

Given Venuti’s late-1990s rejection of speech-act theory, which I discuss in some detail in Robinson (2003: 138–43), I would be happier about his paraphrase of my title had he also cited my book as its source. See also my extended discussion there (ibid: 161–70, 174, 176–80, 185–90, 211–16) of Peirce’s interpretant.

9

For discussion of habit as an “ultimate logical interpretant,” see Short (1982: 288, 299, 301; and 1996: 495, 499–501).

10

For discussion of Peirce’s instinct-experience-habit triad as applied to translation, see Robinson (1997/2003: 86ff).

11

This is the complete passage from Wittgenstein (1953/1984: #172; see also #175): Let us consider the experience of being guided, and ask ourselves: what does this experience consist in when for instance our course is guided? – Imagine the following cases: You are in a playing field with your eyes bandaged, and someone leads you by the hand, sometimes left, sometimes right; you have constantly to be ready for the tug of his hand, and must also take care not to stumble when he gives an unexpected tug. Or again: someone leads you by the hand where you are unwilling to go, by force.

 Translation and the Problem of Sway Or: you are guided by a partner in a dance; you make yourself as receptive as possible, in order to guess his intention and obey the slightest pressure. Or: someone takes you for a walk; you are having a conversation; you go wherever he does. Or: you walk along a field-track, simply following it. 12

Peirce’s multiple theorization of his interpretant triads has led to scholarly debate on the matter, Fitzgerald (1966: 78) considering the emotional, energetic, and logical interpretants to be subcategories of the dynamic interpretant (and thus of unpredictable action in the real world), Short (1981, 1982, 1996, 2004) insisting that they constitute a different way of thinking about the interpretant altogether, and cannot be mapped onto each other. The complexity of this issue in Peirce has a good deal to do with his own restless theoretical imagination: at one point, for example, he argues that the dynamic interpretant “derives its character from the Dyadic category, the category of Action. This has two aspects, the Active and the Passive, which are not merely opposite aspects but make relative contrasts between different influences of this Category as more Active and more Passive” (1958: 315). Elsewhere he insists that “the habit conjoined with the motive and the conditions has the action for its energetic interpretant; but action cannot be a logical interpretant, because it lacks generality” (1934: 491). This may mean either that the logical interpretant cannot be connected in any way with action, and therefore that it cannot possibly be the Third of the dynamic interpretant, since that whole interpretant derives its character from action (and thus that these two formulations are mutually contradictory); or it may mean that only the energetic interpretant expresses the action-oriented aspect or Secondness of the dynamic interpretant, and that the logical interpretant is that final or Third aspect of the dynamic interpretant that is no longer action-based; or it may mean something else.

13

Unless specifically otherwise indicated, all translations from the Finnish of Matson, Hellemann, Varpio, Hekkanen, and others in this chapter are my own.

14

This is our passage in Rantavaara’s revision:

Juhani: Let him be longsuffering towards us and I am willing to pay him his tithes twice over, and the flesh of young game won’t be lacking from his bowl, at lawful times. Mäkelä: Prayers and fine promises won’t help here I’m afraid, when I think of his deep and righteous anger. Juhani: What does he want of us then, and what do you want? Good! Come with seventy men, and blood shall spray around us even then. Mäkelä: Tell me, what steps do you mean to take to learn your alphabet and the Lesser Catechism, which is the chief concern of our Vicar. Juhani: Try what the teaching of Granny Pinewood or her daughter can do for us here at home. Good reading women, both of them. Mäkelä: I will tell the Vicar of your intention. But for the sake of your own peace go and beg his forgiveness for your insolent deed. Juhani: We will think over that point. Mäkelä: Do as I say; and note that unless he observes in you an honest and strenuous endeavour, you’ll be in the stocks, nicely in the stocks one Sunday, under the church windows. This I say; and now farewell! Juhani: Farewell, farewell!



Notes  Tuomas: Did you really mean what you said about Old Granny Pinewood and her daughter? Was it in earnest you half promised to go and crawl before the Vicar. Juhani: There wasn’t a mite of earnest in it, and of truth not a whit. To gain time was what this lad’s prattle was meant for. Granny Pinewood or Venla to guide our readingsticks! Why, even the Toukola pigs would laugh! You heard, we were threatened with the certain stocks, with the pillory of shame. A thousand flaming goblins! Hasn’t a man the right to live his own life as he likes in peace, when he stands in no one’s way, tramples on no one’s rights? Who’ll forbid it? But I say once again: parsons and officials with their books and papers are the evil spirits of mankind. Oh you black sow! Oh cursed day on earth! We’re so knocked head over heels by the blows of hard fate and the cruelty of men, that I could dash my head against a wall. Oh you black bull! Venla refused us; they’ve made a nasty, stinging song about us; the churchwarden tortured us like the Evil One himself; the Toukola boys hammered us like senseless earth, we were trounced like Christmas pigs and now strut here like real Christmas brownies, like one-eyed gnomes with rags round our heads. What more? Isn’t our home now without the poor man’s only treat, the roaring steam of the sauna? There the ruins of our sauna smoke and smoulder. And there’s still the worst of devils left. Hrrh! With all its ten holes the stocks grin at us from the church porch. Bright lightning! If such a bunch of worries doesn’t lift a razor to a man’s throat, what will? Oh you horned bull! (Matson 1929/1973: 93–94) In addition to replacing “thou” with “you,” there, Irma Rantavaara has replaced “the blood shall squirt” with “the blood shall spray” and “the parish clerk” (“the hymnleader” in Matson 1929/1952) with “the churchwarden.” 15

Cf. also Matson (1945: 43–44): A small example. When Juhani exclaims: “Sanoppas se uusi, killattava parakraaffi, sinä Jukolan tietäjä” [“Tell us the new, approved paragraph, thou Jukola’s sage” (Matson 1929: 120), “Tell us the wise proviso to approve, you wise man of Jukola” (Impola 1991: 98)], and then hammers away: “Parakraaffi, parakraaffi!” [“The paragraph, the paragraph!” (Matson ibid), “The proviso, the proviso!” (Impola ibid)] – how should this be translated? Must I fall back on the English word “paragraph”? Or the word “clause”? But in English these are both official, lifeless words. They lack the delicious humor of “parakraaffi.” And what of “killattava”? How should it be translated? “Killattava” – which is to say, to be approved. “Parakraaffi! huudan mina huikeasti” [“The paragraph! I cry madly” (Matson ibid), “The proviso, that’s what I’m screaming about!” (Impola ibid)]. “Tell me the new, approved paragraph.” No, this is not Kivi. But the translator doesn’t really have anywhere else to go.

But obviously “paragraph” and “clause” are not the only places the translator can go. Impola, after all, offers “proviso”; and if we’re listing official English terms for a law or its provisions, we also have “codicil,” “condition,” “article,” “stipulation,” “preclusion,” “prescription,” “statute,” “edict,” “ordinance,” “decree,” “decretum,” and so on. The context of Juhani’s outburst is that the brothers are discussing punishments for any brother who refuses to obey the rules laid down by all seven of them, and Juhani says that as the oldest, he gets to decide on the punishment, and it shall be that the offender shall be trapped for a day or two in a certain cave in the mountain with the entrance stopped up with huge boulders. As the other brothers chime in to protest, Aapo asks for the floor, and says Etten kiltaa minäkään tuota rangaistusparakraaffia,

 Translation and the Problem of Sway jonka tahtoisit käytettäväksi välillemme asettaa, vaan katsonpa sen veljesten keskenä liian törkeäksi, pedolliseksi (Kivi 1870/1984: 117) (“That I don’t hold with that punitive codicil that you would set among us either, but find it too severe, too brutal among brothers”), and Juhani blows his top: Vai et kiltaa? Etkö kiltaa? Etkö totisesti kiltaa? Sanoppas sitten viisaampi parakraaffi, koska mina en milloinkaan käsitä mikä on oikein, mikä väärin (ibid) (“Oh, you don’t hold with it? You don’t hold with it? Really, you don’t hold with it? Okay, then, give us a smarter codicil, since I never know what’s right and what’s wrong”), and when Aapo refuses, Juhani repeats his demand in the form that Matson quotes: tell us the new codicil you do hold with, you pup. In other words, the broader context that Matson fails to mention in his complaint about the difficulty of capturing the deliciousness of Kivi’s prose in English is that Aapo, along with his twin brother Tuomas the second-born, in challenging the autocracy of Juhani, the first-born, uses a fancy legal term, parakraaffi – obviously, like English “paragraph,” borrowed from the classical languages, but far less well assimilated into Finnish than its English equivalent, and so clearly marked as “elite” jargon. Juhani loses his temper at Aapo not just for challenging his authority, in other words, but for putting on airs. The word parakraaffi is a red flag to Juhani precisely because Aapo seems to him to be making an end run around his right of primogeniture by using this word to imply that he (Aapo) is smarter and therefore more fit to make the rules. And in fact part of Juhani’s concern is that Aapo is widely recognized as the smartest brother, both in the village generally – in the Toukola boys’ lampoon, he is called the Jukolas’ Solomon (Kivi 1870/1984: 44) – and among the brothers, who refer to him as viisas “wise” (in this passage Juhani sneeringly calls him sinä Jukolan tietäjä lit. “you Jukola knower,” here perhaps “you Jukola know-it-all”). He is also calmer and more level-headed than Juhani; in the end he becomes a lautamies “juryman,” a law-enforcement officer like Mäkelä in our long passage. All of this obviously makes the impetuous and hot-tempered Juhani even more inclined to fly off the handle when Aapo starts throwing fancy words around. What we need for parakraaffi in English, therefore, as Matson intuits, is not a fairly ordinary word like “paragraph,” but something pretentiously legal, a Latin term that sounds like half-digested legal jargon. Impola’s “proviso” does seem to fit that bill better than “paragraph”; but that doesn’t exhaust our options either. I suggested “punitive codicil” above, for Aapo’s rangaistusparakraaffi. Aapo could also call Juhani’s decree a “penal provision,” or a “disciplinary decretum,” or a “sentencing statute,” or for that matter a “statutory sentence.” And since there is arguably no pressing reason why Aapo should use the term correctly – he’s a rural illiterate, not a lawyer – he could also call it a “penal prevision,” or a “punitory perclusion,” or a “penalization penscription.” Matson’s claim that he has exactly two possible translation options for parakraaffi, “paragraph” and “clause,” sounds to me like student talk: use the first or second word you find in a bilingual dictionary and then throw up your hands in histrionic defeat when your instructor “penscriptively” penalizes you. As for killata “approve,” the problem there takes us in the opposite direction: the verb is archaic, no longer used (except jokingly, “quotingly”) in contemporary Finnish, and therefore sounds more appropriate for an illiterate mid-nineteenth-century young man in his mid-twenties to be using in conversation. Again Matson is right that “approve” isn’t the best possible translation of the term – it is not only too ordinary, as Matson implies, but too educated. “‘Tell me the new, approved paragraph,’” Matson sighs: “No, this is not Kivi.” And he’s right: it’s not. It’s not even close. So why on earth did he give us precisely that as his published translation? Because his imagination fell short? Because his knowledge of (or research into) the English language fell short?



Notes  16

Hekkanen (2010: 23) reads this Kallas comment through a historicizing (DTS) lens: “By this Kallas apparently means that the translation was in her opinion not sufficiently fluent. Matson may thus be imagined as breaking the prevailing norm that a translation was expected to be fluent.” In a note (ibid: 23n6) she adds: “The author’s role in assessing a translation of her own work is, however, questionable. In this case the translation in question may in principle be a good one whose style Kallas personally did not like. It is impossible at this stage to obtain an external assessment.” The implicit argumentative context behind Hekkanen’s insistence here is evidently the essentializing claim – such as I originally made, when first reading Matson’s Seven Brothers in the early seventies – that Matson simply was a mediocre translator. It would obviously be equally problematic for Hekkanen to insist, or even imply, that Matson simply was a good translator; her claim here is only that such judgments must be situated in their historical (and I would add rhetorical) contexts.

17

In the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, a provost can also be the head of a cathedral chapter or foundation; in some monastic communities, the second-in-authority after the abbott is called a provost. But the head clergyman in the Lutheran Church in a small country village would be a vicar in the UK, a senior pastor in the US; and since the parish system in the UK is closer to that in Finland than anything found in the US, “vicar” is probably best.

18

Jarl Hellemann claims, to my mind somewhat surprisingly, that Linna’s novel was to Matson’s liking precisely because Linna was in an important sense Matson’s disciple – a younger writer who learned to write novels under Matson’s tutelage, both in person in the Mäkelä circle and from Matson’s treatise on the art of the novel. In what sense, I wonder, can a novel explicitly engaged in polemics against specific political and military justifications for a specific war be considered “Matsonian”?

19

As Matson (1959: 66–67) writes later: At base there is no difference between art and morality, since both are subjective truth made conscious. They only seem alien to one another because the word “morality” makes us think of inherited moral rules. If we forget them and think of the purpose served by moral rules in all societies and all times, we notice that that purpose is the same as that served by art. Each is enlivened by the human need to bring clarity and order into life, which only works through the creation of values, and to serve its purpose each must begin with actual conditions, which means that their manifestations can neither be everywhere the same nor ever final. Due to their common purpose, they cannot cancel each other out. When they end up in serious conflict with one another, one or the other has become deformed.

20

See Robinson (1998) for a discussion of the technical translator “transfeeling” what the operator does with and in his or her body in using the machine, and Robinson (2008: 200–5) for an extended discussion of “transfeeling.”

21

For Faulkner, see Savolainen (2000), Rekola (2007: 437), Nyman/Kovala (2007: 178), and Sorvali/Häkkinen (2007: 378), who writes: “For example, William Faulkner’s (1897–1962) Finnish translators (primarily Kai Kaila and Alex. Matson) strive to maintain his long meandering sentences, despite the fact that the length of those sentences exceeds general recommendations. This deviation from syntactic norms is typical of the source author, his trademark.” For Joyce,

 Translation and the Problem of Sway see Riikonen 2007: 306, who writes: “For example Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man still depends in Finland upon Alex. Matson’s translation, which appeared in 1946 (and was later edited); the translation is in many respects dated and deficient.” 22 Kaila translated seven Faulkner works for Jarl Hellemann’s Yellow Library at Tammi in the decade from 1965 to 1974: The Sound and the Fury (1965), The Reivers (1966), Absalom, Absalom! (1967), Light in August (1968), The Hamlet (1972), The Town (1973), and The Mansion (1974). 23

A hillbilly is not necessarily someone who lives in the forest; and metsäläinen carries with it the implication that the person lives a primitive isolated life a hundred miles from the nearest neighbor, subsisting entirely on hunting and fishing. Hillbillies tend to be far more social than that. The problem, of course, is that hillbilly culture is geographically localized in the Appalachians, or, some would argue, more broadly in the rural U.S. South; Finland does not really have an equivalent. Since one hillbilly stereotype would have every poor feuding hillbilly family living off a moonshine still, a possible Finnish translation might be pontikankeittäjä “moonshiner.” Or, since these days the term hillbilly has become generalized to mean people living in rural areas (who, from an urban perspective, are thought to be not particularly bright), we could use terms for hicks and rubes, like heinäkenkä (lit. “hayshoe”), jyväjemmari (lit. “kernelstasher”), turvenuija (lit. “sodhammer”), landepaukku (lit. “landclod”), or toukohousu (lit. “sowpant”) (thanks to Ilkka Rekiaro for that list). And obviously a bayou is not a creek; the word Matson is looking for is suorotta “swamp rat.”

24

Note that, just two years after Matson’s translation of As I Lay Dying appeared, in 1954, Väinö Linna published Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier), whose non-officer characters all spoke in painfully accurate representations of various Finnish dialects. Varpio (1979: 32) tells us that Linna originally wrote these characters’ dialogue in a stylized form of those dialects somewhere midway between dialectological accuracy and standard Finnish, but that the publisher (WSOY) hired a linguist to “correct” these representations, to render them more accurate. Linna didn’t particularly like the result, and in his next novel, the monumental three-volume epic Täällä Pohjantähden alla (see Impola 2001), he returned to the stylized middle form he had used for the representation of dialect in his original draft of Tuntematon. The result of WSOY’s intervention was that Tuntematon sotilas unintentionally – Linna was no modernist – helped pave the way for the later radical use of colloquial Finnish by the modernists, beginning in the late 1950s, and especially in Saarikoski’s 1961 translation of Catcher in the Rye. That translation’s use of urban Helsinki slang was so radical, in fact, that its editor – again Jarl Hellemann at Tammi – insisted that Saarikoski create a glossary for the novel. Half a century later, given the far more widespread familiarity with Helsinki slang that Saarikoski’s novel (along with television and travel) has helped promote, it is easy to see that what Saarikoski did there was specifically to stylize Helsinki youth slang, to give it a powerfully literary articulation – and thus in a sense not all that different from Linna’s project just a few years before. Randell (1986: 19–20) and Savolainen (2000: 60) also suggest that Saarikoski’s 1961 translation of Catcher in the Rye and 1964 translation of Ulysses may have paved the way to the massive effort to translate Faulkner into Finnish, beginning in 1965 with Kai Kaila’s rendition of The Sound and the Fury and continuing on with six more novels translated by Kaila through 1974 and three books translated by Paavo Lehtonen in 1969 (a collection of short stories), 1979 (Sanctuary), and 1987 (The Unvanquished).



Notes  25

Hellemann also comments: There seems never to have developed as fruitful an interaction between Sillanpää and his translator as between Aino Kallas and Alex. Matson. Only once did Sillanpää take the trouble to thank his translator for his work, upon the U.K. publication of Meek Heritage, and then not particularly effusively: “I have received the impression from several quarters that it is wonderfully translated – unfortunately I cannot say anything on my own behalf.” The main gist of the letter was a request that Matson translate Sillanpää’s short stories for the Anglo-Saxon magazines. Matson declined, saying he was too busy. (ibid: 168)

26

See Robinson (2003, 2006) for this use of “constative” (and “performative”) to describe not utterances but linguistic methodologies: constative linguistics treating language as an abstract sign system, performative linguistics treating it as people doing things to other people with words.

27

Since my primary concern here is with the interpretant, and not with Matson’s “translator style,” I am using brief excerpts as goads to theoretical complication, rather than making empirical claims based on extensive study of his texts. For an empirical study of Matson’s translator style, using quantitative methods, see Pekkanen (2010).

28

Francis Palgrave, for example, in A Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (1865), wrote (quoted in Rice 1991: 287): To feign a religion which the adventurer himself does not believe, to perform with scrupulous exactitude, as of the highest and holiest import, practices which he inwardly ridicules, and which he intends on his return to hold up to the ridicule of others, to turn for weeks and months together the most sacred and awful bearings of man towards his Creator into a deliberate and truthless mummery, not to mention other and yet darker touches – all this seems hardly compatible with the character of a European gentleman, let alone that of a Christian. Rice (1991) is my primary source for Burton’s biographical information.

29

The other possibility, of course, is that Kivi is so brilliant, and specifically so brilliant in his use of the literary resources of the Finnish language, that he is just plain difficult to translate – which I wouldn’t dispute. Matson (1945:44) writes of the usual literary translation job that the translator tools along with a supercilious smirk, changing things around, omitting this, adding that, “grinding off rough edges,” even, he says, when the source text is supposedly a masterpiece; but then (ibid: 44–46), when the translator is sent a true masterpiece to translate, a work of art, s/he does not look down on it, does not feel superior to the work s/he is translating, does not feel that s/he, the translator, is giving it a little push, helping it up onto its feet. Now s/he is tiny and the text looms dizzyingly high above her or him. S/he gets frustrated – but privately – when s/he can’t find an expression that would do the original justice. S/he wracks his or her brain, not to find something solid behind the original phrase, but to find a form for the thought or the image that is more solid than matter. And it’s strange! – s/he reads the same pages for the hundredth time, reads them carefully, compares them with the translation s/he is creating, and those same pages remain ever

 Translation and the Problem of Sway just as inaccessibly wonderful, solid, but inexhaustible. Not even the longest acquaintance can wear out their wonders. The only problem with this approach to Matson’s Seven Brothers is that, intimidated by the inaccessible wonders of his source text, Matson could have played it safe, and produced a timid, boring translation that still would have been more readable than the disaster he ended up creating. So the question is not why Matson finds himself in trouble with Kivi – anyone would – but why he reacts to that trouble by overreaching his abilities. 30

Here is Christiansen’s (1909: 118) original German: Ich hebe nur eine Gruppe der nicht-sinnlichen Formen hervor, die wichtigste, soweit ich sehe: die Differenzempfindungen. Wird etwas als Abweichung von einem Gewohnten, von einem Normalen, von einem irgendwie geltenden Kanon empfunden, so löst es dadurch eine Stimmungsimpression von besonderer Qualität aus, die generell nicht verschieden ist von den Stimmungselementen sinnlicher Formen, nur daß ihr Antezedens eine Differenz, also etwas nicht sinnlich Wahrnehmbares ist.

Note that Fedotov renders Christiansen’s “(nicht-)sinnliche Form” ([non-]sensuous form) as “(ne)chuvstvennaya forma” ([un]felt form), which Benjamin Sher (1990/1998: 20–21) translates into English as “(non-)sensuous form”. This is especially remarkable in that Sher not only does not have the German original in front of him; he does not even realize that Shklovsky is quoting from a Russian translation of a German original. Because Shklovsky miswrote Christiansen’s first initial as Cyrillic “B” – neglected to convert Roman B (which is Cyrillic V) into Cyrillic Б – Sher went looking for an aesthetician named V. Christiansen, and couldn’t find one, and so listed Christiansen in his bibliography as “S. V. Khristiansen.” It is, obviously, important to my somatic reading of Shklovsky that Fedotov’s Russian translation for these terms (which is all that Shklovsky saw or would have understood) uses the participial form of the verb “to feel,” so that what is characteristic of eine sinnliche Form is that it is felt, and what is characteristic of eine nicht-sinnliche Form is that it is not felt. 31

Here is Christiansen’s (1909: 118–19) German original: Warum ist uns fremdsprachliche Lyrik, auch wenn wir die Sprache erlernt haben, nieÂ� mals ganz erschlossen? Die Klangspiele der Worte hören wir doch, wir vernehmen Reim um Reim und fühlen den Rhythmus, wir verstehen den Sinn der Worte und nehmen Bilder und Vergleiche und Inhalt auf: alle sinnlichen Formen, alles Gegenständliche können wir erfassen. Was fehlt uns noch? Es fehlen uns die Differenzimpressionen: die kleinsten Abweichungen vom Sprachgewohnten in der Wahl des Ausdrucks, in der Kombination der Worte, in der Stellung, in der Verschränkung der Sätze: das alles kann nur erfassen, wer in der Sprache lebt, wer durch ein lebendiges Bewußtsein des Sprachnormalen von jeder Abweichung unmittelbar getroffen wird wie von einer sinnlichen Erregung. Das Normale eine Sprache reicht aber noch weiter. Jede Sprache hat ihren charakteristischen Grad von Abstraktheit und Bildlichkeit, die Häufigkeit gewisser Klangmischungen und gewisse Arten des Vergleichs gehören zu ihrer Gewohnheit: jede Abweichung davon empfindet nur in voller Stärke, wem die Sprache als Muttersprache vertraut ist; ihn aber trifft jedes Anderssein eines Ausdrucks, eines Bildes, einer Wortverbindung mit der Stimmung eines sinnlichen Eindrucks. Das ist



Notes  der Grund, warum wir fremdsprachliche Lyrik niemals ganz verstehen: es fehlen uns hier zur Synthese des ästhetischen Objekts wesentliche Momente. Dabei gibt es die Möglichkeit einer Differenzverdopplung und einer DifferenzÂ� umkehrung. Eine bestimmte Distanz vom Gewohnten kann ihrerseits wieder Ausgangspunkt und Maß für Abweichungen sein, sodaß von hier aus nun jede R ü ck k e h r zum Gewohnten als Differenz empfunden wird. 32

In a sense this is understandable: Soviet editions of the novel gloss qui pro quo in a footnote (“‘одно вместо другого’, путаница, недоразумение (лат.)” “odno vmesto drugogo”, putanitsa, nedorazymenie (lat.) “‘one instead of the other’, mix-up, misconception (Lat.),” Dostoevsky 1890/1963: 1.315n), so that Pevear and Volokhonsky would not have been likely to make carelessly the same mistake Garnett made without this alarm bell, using a pre-Soviet edition of the novel.

33

I should note that все стало быть here is literally, as I indicate, “everything came to be,” or perhaps “everything started to be,” but that this does not render the temporal dynamic of either Garnett’s “is still in the Pope’s hands” or Pevear and Volokhonsky’s “everything now belongs to the pope” incorrect. Literally the Russian phrase does point to the beginning of the time period during which everything comes to belong to the Pope, and not to its current phase, 1500 years later; but стало stalo “(be)came, started” there actually serves as a kind of causal link, so that the implication of the auxiliary verb is that hence everything is in the Pope’s hands, hence everything now belongs to the Pope. Both Garnett and Pevear and Volokhonsky correctly render this causal connective with “therefore.” 34 The temporal confusion in Garnett’s translation, however, is not corrected by Pevear and Volokhonsky: they render до времени do vremeni “before/until the [appointed] time” as “for the time being.” The two different translations are very similar on that point, as they are in fact on the awkward pair of clauses I discussed in the previous paragraph, which Garnett renders “and there is no need for Thee to come now at all. Thou must not meddle for the time, at least” and Pevear and Volokhonsky render “and you may as well not come at all now, or at least don’t interfere with us for the time being.” I argued that these two clauses in Russian suffer from the typical Dostoevsky random wordiness, and could stand – if we wanted to “naturalize” them – to be cut down to something like “just stay away” or “don’t come here at all”; but neither translation takes this path. If we chunk the sentence syntagmatically, we get something like this:

Dostoevsky

Garnett

Pevear/Volokhonsky

а ты хоть и не приходи теперь вовсе не мешай до времени по крайней мере

there is ... for Thee no need ... to come now at all Thou must not meddle for the time at least

and you may as well not come now at all don’t interfere with us for the time being or at least

 Translation and the Problem of Sway Both renditions scrupulously retain all the excess verbal baggage that Dostoevsky arguably should have dumped; and both “naturalize” that baggage in similar ways, Garnett rendering “don’t even come” as “There is no need for Thee to come,” Pevear and Volokhonsky as “and you may as well not come.” These are slightly different naturalizations, obviously, but both strive equally to soften or diffuse the bald command “don’t even come” with longer idiomatic expressions. If either translation naturalizes slightly more than the other, in fact, it would be the Pevear and Volokhonsky: – – –

to Garnett’s translation of не мешай ne meshay “don’t meddle/interfere” as “Thou must not meddle” it adds the objective prepositional phrase “with us” (“don’t interfere with us”) to Garnett’s mistranslation of до времени do vremeni “until/before the time” as “for the time” it adds the word “being” to Garnett’s translation of по крайней мере po krayney mere “at least” it adds the conjunction “or”

35

But note that the devout Russian Orthodox Dostoevsky did not capitalize папа papa “the pope” – that would have been excessive respect for the leader of the Roman Catholic Church – and Garnett did.

36

See my discussions of Shklovsky and Brecht in Robinson (2008: chs. 3 and 5).

37

Fisher (1987: 193) anticipates something like my challenge, and responds that yes, “there are deliberately conceived structures that can be and are imposed on ideals and feelings” that are not narrative based, such as “introductions, climaxes, sonnet form, epic form, types of formal argumentation, and other structurations of communication. I have diverged from rhetorical, logical, and poetic traditions, however, by claiming that behind any structure that is given to human communication, the perceptual framework of narration will always also be constraining and projecting meaning” (emphasis in original). While it is certainly true, as Fisher (ibid) goes on to say, that “ideas and feelings will always be sensed in and through time,” it is perhaps an excessive generalization to suggest that temporal perception necessarily entails narrative structuration. My counterargument is twofold: there are affective and kinesthetic channels of perception that convey interpretancy at a prenarrative level or phase of knowing or coming-to-know; and at the level or phase at which narrativity plays a significant role in imposing structure on understanding, there are other channels of structuration as well. 38

Peirce’s instinct-experience-habit triad is developed in a sketchy fashion (and even more sketchily assimilated to his abduction-induction-deduction triad) in the paragraphs (1931–1958: 5.477–480) immediately following the passage from “Prolegomena” (ibid: 5.476) that I quoted in Chapter 2 on the emotional-energetic-logical interpretant triad. Peirce begins theorizing the abduction-induction-deduction triad around the turn of the century, a good six to seven years before theorizing the emotional-energetic-logical interpretant and instinct-experience-habit triads; see Peirce (ibid: 1.65, 2.96, 2.102, 2.774, 2.776, 5.144–146, 5.171–172, 5.181, 5.188–189, 5.590, 5.600, 6.525, 7.202, 7.218, 7.219, 7.220n18, 8.209; 1976: 4.37–38, 4.62, 4.319–320; 1985: 2.895, 898–900, 2.1031–1032; 1992, 1998: 2.287, 2.299; 1997: 276–277, 282–283). Peirce (1931–1958: 5.478) just barely adumbrates this complex history of thought, mentioning “induction” by name and possibly referring obliquely to a phenomenology akin to the “guessing” of abduction under the rubric of “surprise.” For an extended application of the instinct-experience-habit and abductioninduction-deduction triads to the process of translation, see Robinson (1997/2003: ch. 4).



Notes  39

Baker (ibid: 87–88) works hard to avoid slipping into this kind of strict-cognitivist rationalism: Different genres, including the verbal and non-verbal activities embedded in them, are also often associated with specific formal features such as length, duration, thematic content, pitch and loudness, level of formality, and setting. These features, again, are not cosmetic. At one extreme, compliance with them could determine whether a given behaviour is intelligible at all. MacIntyre gives a good example which illustrates the impact of setting: If in the middle of my lecture on Kant’s ethics I suddenly broke six eggs into a bowl and added flour and sugar, proceeding all the while with my Kantian exegesis, I have not, simply in virtue of the fact that I was following a sequence prescribed by Fanny Farmer, performed an intelligible action. (1981: 194–5) Beyond the question of intelligibility, these features also contribute to the elaboration of individual narratives set within the relevant generic boundaries. An eyewitness report is expected to focus on grave and usually very painful incidents, and hence whatever is presented as falling within this genre is implicitly injected with these meanings. On the other hand, a political speech delivered in a soft tone is likely to be exprienced [sic] as ineffective, or ‘wishy washy’ in common parlance. Nevertheless, the fit between an individual text and the genre in which it is moulded is rarely complete. For one thing, different people make their own decisions as to how closely they wish to conform to or deviate from genre conventions, and this in itself signals certain aspects of their ontological narratives – whether they want to project themselves as disciplined, adventurous, confident or skilful, for instance. Baker’s insistence there on referring to “length, duration, thematic content, pitch and loudness, level of formality, and setting” as “specific formal features” would seem to suggest that she is reducing communication to rationally discursive textuality: length, duration, pitch, and loudness are all nonverbal aspects of the utterance that can be empirically measured and formalized; thematic content and setting are often objectivized in literary studies as formal features of a text; and sociolinguists often reduce “level of formality” too to abstract formal markers that can be identified stably in the text. But then she cites the example from MacIntyre, in which “setting” is manifestly not a formal textual feature but a place and a time and an institutional context, and in this case specifically two conflicting institutional contexts, the university lecture and cooking – or perhaps three, since the cooking context is simultaneously “cooking” and the literary cooking of the “sequence prescribed by Fanny Farmer.” Even that unmistakably rhetorical situation, though, threatens to collapse into rationalist formalism, when MacIntyre opines that in cooking while lecturing on Kant he has not “performed an intelligible action” – as if the students’ ability to make sense of an action were somehow irrelevant here, as if his action either objectively had or objectively did not have the quality of “intelligibility” – at which point Baker admirably again moves “beyond the question of intelligibility” to rhetorical situation. At first her conception of rhetorical situation is conventionalized, based on guided patterns of expectation: “An eyewitness report is expected to focus on grave and usually very painful incidents, and hence whatever is presented as falling within this genre is implicitly injected with these meanings. On the other hand, a political speech

 Translation and the Problem of Sway delivered in a soft tone is likely to be exprienced [sic] as ineffective, or ‘wishy washy’ in common parlance.” But then she recognizes that the interactive guidance provided to conversational participants by conventionalization, while more or less stable, never works perfectly either: “different people make their own decisions as to how closely they wish to conform to or deviate from genre conventions.” 40

Fisher is more careful to relativize these “transcendent” values than Baker: on the page where he first proposes them as one of the “good reasons” people adduce for believing something, he encourages us to ask specifically whether “the values the message offers [are] those that, in the estimation of the critic, constitute the ideal basis for human conduct?” (ibid: 109; emphasis added); and a few pages later he warns specifically against universalizing any values (treating them as “field-invariant”): “Whether through perversity, divine inspiration, or genetic programming, people make their choices freely, and their choices will not be bound by ideal or ‘perfect’ value systems – except of their own making” (ibid: 114). Still, his third mention of transcendent values does seem to stabilize and universalize them: “The fact that the conclusions [in Death of a Salesman and The Great Gatsby] are familiar, even though the works in which they appear are fresh and compelling, indicates both the transcendence and the immediate worth of the values” (ibid: 177). 41

Baker in fact wants to construct this descriptive approach evaluatively, reading Fisher’s depictions of how people assess narratives as a guide to more effective assessment: “Fisher’s narrative paradigm can help us assess a narrative elaborated in a single text as well as diffuse narratives that have to be pieced together from a variety of sources and media” (ibid: 155). This approach for Baker is in lieu of the unreflective binary rational/objective assessment (right or wrong) vs. the utter inability to assess any narrative (anything goes); Fisher seems to offer a middle path between those extremes, a set of criteria that we scholars can use (rather than, as for Fisher, that everybody always uses) to decide whether a narrative works. Baker has her own political agenda in the book, a pointed “critique of US, UK, and Israeli policies” (ibid: 6), but she is careful not to present her agenda as rationally or objectively right: “Needless to say, the analysis [of two narratives later in the chapter] is inevitably conducted from my specific narrative location, which means that others applying the same system may come up with a different analysis of the same narrative” (ibid: 141). Still, implicit in the notion that Fisher’s narrative paradigm can help us scholars assess narratives more effectively – more consciously, more rationally, and thus perhaps more reliably – would appear to be the hope that the use of this paradigm makes Baker’s take on her two sample language-mediation histories (the MLA allowing the CIA to recruit language instructors at their annual conference; the crypto-commercial operations of Translators Without Borders) more convincing, and therefore seemingly more right. If we humans, social animals, do always assess narratives this way, as Fisher suggests, then the use of Fisher’s paradigm doesn’t promise anything of the kind; it is mere pluralistic descriptivism. If, as Baker takes Fisher to be suggesting, this is a new and improved evaluative model for the assessment of narratives, now exclusively available to readers of his book (and of Baker’s), then perhaps its use can stand in as the next best thing to rational and objective rightness. (Rhetorical “rightness,” after all, just means convincing a lot of people – and the ability to convince one’s audience that one is using a superior set of criteria is potentially highly convincing.) While Fisher (1987) specifically disavows the use of his paradigm for reliable (field-invariant) assessments of narratives, I should note, he does often slip into a manner of speaking that



Notes  would seem to suggest that he still entertains such notions subliminally: “When the narrative paradigm is used in exploring discourses, the texts are viewed as verbal phenomena composed of good reasons (some reasons, of course, being better than others) as elements that function as warrants for believing or acting in accord with the message of the text” (ibid: 143). This formulation is entirely in line with Baker’s (2006) use of the paradigm. 42

But see Fisher (1987: 148) for a discussion of “character” as “not exactly synonymous with the traditional concept of ethos.” 43 To be fair, however, after devoting a chapter to Perelman’s conception that argumentation requires an audience that is reasonable, pluralistic, and committed to justice, Fisher (1987: 136–37) writes:

Perelman’s aims and my objective are essentially the same: to formulate a theory of reason, value, and action that gives meaning and significance to everyday life and to human communication in particular. I agree with Perelman’s view on the necessity of recognizing and accepting pluralism. However, I would place love as the highest value or motivation in life, displacing justice from the pinnacle in the hierarchy of values. Love provides the ground of being and is the motive that should inform all others in human decision making and action. Perelman may well have agreed with this idea, and he could have then argued, rightly I think, that justice is a form of love, that civiclove is a way of honoring the dignity and worth of individuals and ensuring by rule their well-being in society. Still, even this does not account for the power and significance of emotional appeals in human communication; love for Fisher is “the highest value or motivation in life,” but not necessarily a channel of rhetorical persuasion. And love is only the most “positive” of the affects that typically do influence communicative acts. 44 Indeed Fisher (1987: 154–55) specifically identifies Reagan’s heroification of his audience as an “implied audience” that seems for him to be a stable textual feature – not an actual rhetorical interchange between speaker and listeners. 45

Toulmin (1958: 1) in fact sets his book up to have precisely this effect: What is the nature of these problems [that I raise here]? In a sense they are logical problems. Yet it would perhaps be misleading to say that they were problems in logic, for the whole tradition of the subject would lead a reader to expect much that he will not find in these pages. Perhaps they had better be described as problems about logic; they are problems which arise with special force not within the science of logic, but only when one withdraws oneself for a moment from the technical refinements of the subject, and inquires what bearing the science and its discoveries have on anything outside itself – how they apply in practice, and what connections they have with the canons and methods we use when, in everyday life, we actually assess the soundness, strength and conclusiveness of arguments.

Toulmin (1922–2009) – university lecturer in the philosophy of science at Oxford 1949–1954, visiting professor of the history and philosophy of science at Melbourne University 1954–1955, professor of philosophy at Leeds 1955–1959 – was very much in the tradition of ordinary-language philosophy then revolutionizing the field at Cambridge, under the influence of Ludwig

 Translation and the Problem of Sway Wittgenstein (his 1949 Cambridge dissertation was a Wittgensteinian study of ethics), and at Oxford, under the influence of J. L. Austin (for Austin see Toulmin 1958: 48–53). The Uses of Argument should be read as one of the three great works of ordinary-language philosophy from the 1950s, along with Wittgenstein’s (1953) Philosophical Investigations and Austin’s 1955 Harvard lectures that were published posthumously as How To Do Things With Words (1961/1975). 46

Indeed one staple of writing-studies readings of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (see Corbett 1965: 45–70, Kinneavy 1971: 236–53, Brandt et al. 1969: 14–17, Green 1980: 623–25, Gage 1984: 156–57, Raymond 1984: 142, Neel 1995: 63–65) has been that the enthymeme is a kind of truncated syllogism designed for less-educated people – and what is imagined as “left out” of the syllogism in the enthymeme is the universal major premise, or what Toulmin calls the warrant, precisely because it is general cultural knowledge that “goes without saying.” Indeed experts in writing pedagogy often find themselves defining Toulmin’s warrant for first-year students as the “understood” or “implied” that should not be spelled out in a paper, because saying “All men are mortal” or “If anything is red, it will not also be black” (Toulmin ibid: 98) is insulting to the reader’s intelligence. For critiques of this reading of Aristotle see Gaines (2008: 12–18) and Walker (2000: 168–84). Gaines’ (ibid: 16) argument against the enthymeme-as-truncated-syllogism reading is that, while it is “certainly consistent with Aristotle’s view,” it “bleeds out” of the Aristotelian enthymeme most of what is most Aristotelian about the enthymeme: “its formal relation to special and common topics, its material relation to signs, necessary signs, and probabilities, and, more generally, the intellectual apparatus that Aristotle erects around the enthymeme to guide its potential user.” Walker’s critique is that calling the enthymeme a truncated syllogism tends to construct the Aristotelian syllogism in terms of “what ‘syllogism’ and ‘logic’ have generally meant in modern, Western culture,” namely “formalized, propositional reasoning” (ibid: 170), whereas in fact “the nontechnical meaning of ‘syllogism’ in ancient Greek seems to be nothing more than ordinary, informal reasoning and inference and ..., in the context of discussion and debate, this meaning includes informal (as well as formal) reasoning/inference from probable assumptions or received opinions granted by one’s audience. If, then, ‘syllogism’ can be used in such a sense with reference to everyday thought and discourse, why use ‘enthymeme’ to name the same thing? By carelessly invoking ‘enthymeme’ as ‘the rhetorical syllogism,’ one may make a distinction without a difference” (ibid: 171). Walker’s reading of enthymeme is grounded in its thumos-root, and thus in affect: “it is this ‘in-thymatic’ kind of rationality that makes it possible for one to judge whether a person’s emotional responses to a given situation are ‘reasonable’ (or simply intelligible) or not under the circumstances, and that makes emotional response at least potentially amenable to persuasion” (ibid: 174). I would agree completely, but suspect that Aristotle might not: “And when you would create pathos, do not speak enthymemes; for the enthymeme either ‘knocks out’ [ekkrousei: knocks out, drives back, repulses] the pathos or is spoken in vain” (Rhetoric 3.17.8, 1418a, Kennedy 1991/2007: 243). Interesting to think of logos and pathos as boxers in the ring or as enemies on the battlefield, and logos (according to Aristotle) either winning or vitiating the enthymeme by being defeated. 47

The great integrator of psychological, psychoanalytical, and psychobiological research on affect regulation in our time is Allan N. Schore (2003a, 2003b). In the emerging research model now being developed out of Bowlby’s attachment theory, Kohut’s self psychology, and Damasio’s somatic-marker hypothesis, affect regulation and dysregulation are products of nonverbal and largely unconscious/preconscious right-brain-to-right-brain communication, and specifically the communicative synchronization of affect through the mirroring of body language. Initially



Notes  this regulatory communication occurs between the primary caregiver (Schore says simply the mother) and the newborn infant, and then in communicative dyads throughout the rest of the individual’s life, especially the therapist-patient dyad. One of the weaknesses of Schore’s integrative approach from the perspective of somatic theory is that he completely ignores the synchronization of affect in larger groups, despite the attention paid to the mother-father-infant triad by Freud and his most radical followers, including Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, who associate what Schore calls affective right-brain body-based communication with the mother and verbal left-brain symbolic communication with the father; and certainly Freud was increasingly fascinated, toward the end of his life, especially in Civilization and its Discontents, with societal regulation of affect (the Unbehagen or dysregulation caused by misattuned societal regulation of Behagen or pleasure). Schore (2003b: 8) writes: Mutual gaze interactions increase over the second and third quarters of the first year, and because they occur within the “split second world of the mother and infant” (Stern, 1977) are therefore not easily visible. This dialogue is best studied by a frameby-frame analysis of film, and in such work Beebe and Lachmann (1988a) observed synchronous rapid movements and fast changes in affective expressions within the dyad. ... This affective mirroring is accomplished by a moment-by-moment matching of affective direction in which both partners increase together their degree of engagement and facially expressed positive affect. The fact that the coordination of responses is so rapid suggests the existence of a bond of unconscious communication. ... These mirroring exchanges generate much more than over facial changes in the dyad; they represent a transformation of inner events. Beebe and Lachmann (1988a) asserted that as the mother and the infant match each other’s temporal and affective patterns, each recreates an inner psychophysiological state similar to the partner’s. In synchronized gaze the dyad creates a mutual regulatory system of arousal (Stern, 1983) in which they both experience a state transition as they move together from a state of neutral affect and arousal to one of heightened positive emotion and high arousal. Here “the child is using the output of the mother’s right cortex as a template for the imprinting – the hard wiring of circuits in his/her own right cortex that will come to mediate his/her expanding affective capacities. It has been said that in early infancy the mother is the child’s ‘auxiliary cortex’ (Diamond, Krech, & Rosenzweig, 1963). In these transactions she is ‘downloading programs’ from her brain into the infant’s brain” (ibid: 13), so that “in dyadic, ‘symbiotic states’ the infant’s ‘open,’ immature, and developing internal homeostatic systems are interactively regulated by the caregiver’s more mature and differentiated nervous system. Self-objects are thus external psychobiological regulators (Taylor, 1987) that facilitate the regulation of affective experience (Palombo, 1992), and they act at nonverbal levels beneath conscious awareness to cocreate states of maximal cohesion and vitalization (Wolf, 1988)” (ibid: 14). 48 Fisher (1987: 125–26) writes: “The only other specific criterion of argumentative quality mentioned by Perelman is ‘efficacy.’ ‘An efficacious argument,’ he wrote, ‘is one which succeeds in increasing this intensity of adherence among those who hear it in such as way as to set in motion the intended action (a positive action or an abstention from action) or at least in creating in the hearers a willingness to act which will appear at the right moment’ [Perelman/OlbrechtsTyteca 1969: 45].”

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Bibliography  Sillanpää, F. E. (1919/1946) Hurskas kurjuus (“Pious Wretchedness,” translated by Matson as Meek Heritage). 7th edition. Helsinki: Otava. Sillanpää, F. E. (1931/1932) Nuorena nukkunut: Eli vanhan sukupuun viimeinen vihanta (translated into English by Matson as Fallen Asleep While Young). 4th edition. Helsinki: Otava. Somers, Margaret (1992) “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation.” Social Science History 16.4: 591–630. Somers, Margaret (1997) “Deconstructing and Reconstructing Class Formation Theory: Narrativity, Relational Analysis, and Social Theory.” In John R. Hall, ed., Reworking Class, 73– 105. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Somers, Margaret R., and Gloria Gibson (1994) “Reclaiming the Epistemological ‘Other’: Narrative and the Social Constitution of Identity.” In Craig Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, 37–99. Oxford: Blackwell. Sorvali, Irma, and Kaisa Häkkinen (2007) “Kieli muuttuu, entä käännöskieli?” (“Language Changes; What About Translated Language?”). In H. K. Riikonen, Urpo Kovala, Pekka Kujamäki, and Outi Paloposki, eds., Suomennoskirjallisuuden historia 1, 376–86. Volume 1 of Hannu Riikonen (gen. ed.), Suomennoskirjallisuuden historia 1–2 (“The History of Literature Translated into Finnish 1–2”). Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Stolze, Radegundis (2003) Hermeneutik und Translation (“Hermeneutics and Translation”). Tübingen: Narr. Tarkiainen, V. (1915/1950) Aleksis Kivi: Elämä ja teokset (“Aleksis Kivi: The Life and Works”). 5th edition. Porvoo and Helsinki: WSOY. Terras, Victor (1981) A Karamazov Companion: Commentary on the Genesis, Language, and Style of Dostoevsky’s Novel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Toulmin, Stephen Edelston (1958) The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Toury, Gideon (1980) In Search of a Theory of Translation. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. Toury, Gideon (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vail’, Pyotr, and Aleksandr Genis (2007) Rodnaya Rech’: Uroki izyaschoy slovesnosti (“Our Own Speech: Lessons in the Elegance of Word-Culture”). Moscow: Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Varpio, Yrjö (1971) Alex Matson kirjallisena vaikuttajahahmona (“Alex. Matson as an Influential Literary Figure”). Publications of the Finnish Literature Department at the University of Tampere 1. Tampere, Finland: University of Tampere. Varpio, Yrjö (1979) Pentinkulma ja maailma: Tutkimus Väinö Linnan teosten kääntämisestä, julkaisemisesta ja vastaanotosta ulkomailla (“Pentinkulma and the World: A Study of the Translation, Publication, and Reception of Väinö Linna’s Works Abroad”). Porvoo and Helsinki: Werner Söderström. Venuti, Lawrence (1986) “The Translator’s Invisibility.” Criticism 28.2: 179–212. Venuti, Lawrence (1991) “Genealogies of Translation Theory: Schleiermacher.” TTR 4.2: 125–50. Venuti, Lawrence (1993) “Translation as Cultural Politics: Regimes of Domestication in English.” Textual Practice 7.2: 208–23. Venuti, Lawrence (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence (1998) The Scandals of Translation: Toward an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge.

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Index A Abusive translation (Lewis),╇ 115, 173 Aesthetic theory of translation (Martindale),╇ 18–21, 39, 43 Almah as virgin (Isaiah 7:14),╇ 2–4, 6–7 Aristotle,╇ x–xi, 24, 89, 125, 167, 184–87, 210; and ēthos,╇ 92–95, 175–78, 184–86; and logos,╇ 92–95, 175; and pathos,╇ 175–76 Armstrong, Nancy,╇ 35–36 Armstrong, Richard H.╇ 32–34, 36 “Art as Device” (Shklovsky),╇ 123–26 Augustine,╇ 2–4, 7 Austin, J.L.,╇ 77, 210 Automatization (Bergson, Shklovsky),╇ 123 Axiological: interpretant,╇ 150– 54, 156; level (Venuti),╇ 14, 161 B Baker, Mona,╇ ix, xi–xii, xiii, 207–8; on narrativity,╇ 13–15, 161–68; on affective contagion in interpreting,╇ 168–74; on Fisher,╇ 174–78, 182–87, 189 Bakhtin, Mikhail,╇ 90–92, 166–67; and dialogism in Dostoevsky,╇ 91, 140, 145–47, 156 Barthes, Roland,╇ 134; and the pleasure of the text,╇ 39, 77, 96 Bateson, Gregory,╇ 34 Beauty in translation (Martindale),╇ x, 20, 43, 97 Benjamin, Walter,╇ 115 Bergson, Henri,╇ 123 Blanchot, Maurice,╇ 21 Bohm, David,╇ 117–20 Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, The (translated by Burton),╇ 103, 104, 106

Bourdieu, Pierre,╇ 34–36 Brafman, Ori and Rom,╇ x, 7–11, 12, 133, 150, 178, 195 Brecht, Bertolt,╇ 113, 206 Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky),╇ xi, 113, 131–59 Bruner, Jerome,╇ 165, 174–75 Buffon, George-Luis Leclerc de,╇ 99 Burnasheva, N. I.,╇ 190–92 Burton, Sir Richard,╇ 103, 104 Butler, Judith,╇ 108, 166

Descriptive Translation Studies,╇ 17, 34, 161, 189, 193 Dialogue,╇ 90–92, 166; see also Bakhtin Dostoevsky, Fyodor,╇ xi, 91, 113, 131–59, 205–6; and “bad writing,”╇ 135–39, 145, 147, 149–56; and double-voicing,╇ 156; and polyphonic style,╇ 145–49, 156 Double-voicing (Bakhtin),╇ 146– 47, 156 Dryden, John,╇ 18–19, 103

C Carpenter, William,╇ 121 Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, translated by Saarikoski),╇ 202 Cervantes, Miguel Saavedra de,╇ 52, 58 Chameleon-effect (Brafmans),╇ 7, 8, 178 Chapman, George,╇ 102–3, 111 Chekhov, Anton,╇ 125 Cheyfitz, Eric,╇ 114–15, 130 Christiansen, Broder,╇ 123–25, 128, 129, 204–5 Commitment (Brafmans),╇ 7, 133 Conrad, Joseph,╇ 136, 147 Cowl, R.P.,╇ 55, 104 Cultural belonging,╇ 105–11; and Burton,╇ 106; and culture shock,╇ 169–73; and habitualized interpretants,╇ 63; and patriotism,╇ 110; and translator intercultures,╇ 107–8; Culture shock, and foreignism,╇ 172–73

E Eco, Umberto,╇ 13, 20, 23–27, 37–38, 92, 134, 181 Emerson, Caryl,╇ xi; on Bakhtin,╇ 90, 166; on Dostoevsky,╇ 131–40, 143–44, 147, 149 Emotional interpretant,╇ 36–38, 63; and Aristotle’s pathos,╇ 92–95 Endless semiosis (Lacan),╇ 28 Energetic interpretant,╇ 36–38, 63; and Aristotle’s ēthos,╇ 92– 95 Enthymeme (Aristotle),╇ 210 Equivalence, formal vs. dynamic (Nida),╇ 6; as convergence of group proprioceptions,╇ 128 Estrangement (Shklovsky),╇ 123– 27 Ethical interpretant,╇ xi, 97–98; and cultural belonging,╇ 108; as important channel of foreignism,╇ 101 Ēthos (Aristotle), and characterological coherence (Fisher),╇ 175–78, 184–87; and the energetic interpretant,╇ 92–95; see also ethical interpretant Even-Zohar, Itamar,╇ 34

D Damasio, Antonio,╇ 120–21 Das Man (Heidegger),╇ 34 Defamiliarization (Shklovsky/ Lemon/Reis),╇ 123 Depersonalized (post)structuralist semiotics,╇ 25–26, 77

 Translation and the Problem of Sway F Faulkner, William,╇ x, 72–80, 82, 86, 89, 99, 100–1; Matson’s translation of As I Lay Dying,╇ 42, 55, 68, 77–80; Matson’s translation of Wild Palms,╇ 42, 55, 68, 72–77, 88; Finnish translations by Kai Kaila,╇ 201, and Paavo Lehtonen,╇ 202 Fawcett, Peter,╇ 173 Fedotov, A.,╇ 124 Feeling: of cultural belonging and culture shock,╇ 169–73; of the foreign,╇ 113–15; of language proficiency,╇ 63, 108–11; as regulatory pressure,╇ 167 Fisher, Walter R.,╇ 174–78, 182– 87, 189, 206; and transcendental values,╇ 172, 208–9; on efficacy (Perelman),╇ 211 Five Clocks (Joos),╇ 99 Fluency (Venuti),╇ 14, 77, 87; in Garnett’s Dostoevsky,╇ 131–35, 149 Foreignism (Venuti),╇ xi, 14, 77; as authoritarian rhetoric,╇ 129; and the Brechtian Verfremdungseffect,╇ 155; as denaturalization,╇ 152; and the ethical interpretant,╇ 101; ethics of,╇ 114–15; as fidelity,╇ 151; and fluency,╇ 14, 77, 87; in Matson,╇ 42, 50–51, 79–80, 85–87; in Pevear and VoloÂ� khonsky’s Dostoevsky,╇ 131–35, 149; and the phenomenological fade,╇ 113–15; as a phenomenology,╇ 129 Form, and Matson’s New Criticism,╇ 63–68 Formal interpretant,╇ xi, 14, 85, 87, 92, 150 G Gaines, Robert N.,╇ 210 Galah margelah, as “uncover the feet” (Ruth 3:4),╇ 4–7, 8 Garnett, Constance,╇ xi, 131–59, 205–6 German Romantics,╇ 113, 123 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,╇ 123 Goffman, Erving,╇ 173, 174 Green, Jay P., Sr.╇ 4, 5

Grice, H. Paul,╇ 100, 106 Group speech act (Austin/ Robinson),╇ 89, 93 H Habit (Peirce): change of,╇ 28–31, 113, 125, 129; and instinctexperience,╇ 197; and sense of cultural belonging,╇ 63, 169–73; as “ultimate logical interpretant” (Short),╇ 197; undoing of, in surprise,╇ 170 Habitualization (Peirce),╇ 151; of interpretants╇ 31, 37 Habitus (Bourdieu),╇ 34–35 Heidegger, Martin,╇ 34 Hekkanen, Raila,╇ 198, 201 Hellemann, Jarl,╇ 55, 57–59, 61–63, 77, 82, 198, 201–203 Here Under the North Star (Linna/Impola),╇ 60 Hermeneutics: in translation theory,╇ 29–30; of style,╇ 99 Holberg, Ludvig,╇ 52, 58 Hollo, J.A.,╇ 57 Holmes, James,╇ 17 Homer,╇ 32–33, 36, 52, 58, 103, 127–28 Hook, paragraph,╇ 82–83, 88, 90, 99 How To Do Things With Words (Austin),╇ 210 Human Communication as Narration (Fisher),╇ 175 Humboldt, Wilhelm von,╇ 123 Hurskas kurjuus (Sillanpää),╇ 54, 83–85 Husserl, Edmund,╇ 37 I Ideosomatics (Robinson),╇ 36, 121, 125 Idiosomatics (Robinson),╇ 36 Impola, Richard,╇ xii, 42, 59–61 Internal dialogism (Bakhtin),╇ 90–92 Interpretant (Peirce/Eco/ Venuti),╇ ix–xii, 13–15, 17–18, 20, 23–39, 104, 161–63, 165, 189; axiological,╇ 150–57; emotional-energetic-logical triad,╇ 36–38, 166–68, 170, 196–97, 198; ethical,╇ xi, 97–98, 101, 108; formal vs.

thematic (Venuti),╇ xi, 14, 85, 87, 92, 150; and historical situatedness,╇ 113; logical,╇ xi, 36–38, 63, 92–96, 110, 170, 173; metaformal,╇ 133–34, 157; metathematic,╇ 133–34, 137–38, 157; methodological,╇ 133–34, 157; pathetic,╇ xi, 94, 96–97 Isaiah 7:14 (almah as virgin),╇ 2–4, 7 J James, William,╇ 123, 124 Jerome,╇ 3, 5 Joos, Martin,╇ 99 Joyce, James,╇ 78, 82, 86, 88, 89, 100, 123, 201; Portrait as translated by Matson,╇ x, xii, 42, 55, 68–72, 85, 88, 122; Ulysses as translated by Saarikoski,╇ 55, 122, 202 K Kafka, Franz,╇ 27, 30, 37, 41, 85, 113 Kaila, Kai,╇ 201, 202 Kallas, Aino,╇ x, 42, 54, 80–82, 86, 100, 201, 203 Kant, Immanuel,╇ 96–97 Kantor, David,╇ 9, 195 Kermode, Frank,╇ 21 Kinesthetic metaphorization (Lakoff and Johnson),╇ 166 Kivi, Aleksis,╇ x, 42–52, 82, 98, 101–11, 203–4; see also Seven Brothers L Lacan, Jacques,╇ 77, 197 Language proficiency: as a phenomenology,╇ 108–11; and sway,╇ 63 Layton, Susan,╇ 189–94 Lebensform (Wittgenstein),╇ 34 Lebenswelt (Stolze),╇ 29–31, 132, 133, 138, 150, 153, 154 Lehtonen, Paavo,╇ 202 Leppihalme, Ritva,╇ xii, 60 Levine, Suzanne Jill,╇ 153 Lewis, Philip E.,╇ 115, 173 Lindsay, Jennifer,╇ 173 Linna, Väinö,╇ xii, 42, 60, 62, 63–64, 201; use of dialect



Index  in Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier), 202 Logical interpretant,╇ xi, 36–38, 63, 92–96, 110, 173; undone in surprise,╇ 170 Logos (Aristotle): and good reasons (Fisher),╇ 175; and the logical interpretant,╇ 92–95 Loss-aversion (Brafmans),╇ 7–8 M Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, The (Sacks),╇ 116–17 Martindale, Charles,╇ x, 18–21, 31–32, 39, 41, 43, 96–97, 103 Matson, Alex.,╇ x, xii, 21, 41–111, 198, 201, 202, 203; original works: “Aleksis Kivi kääntäjän silmillä nähtynä” (Aleksis Kivi Seen Through the Eyes of the Translator),╇ 101–2, 107; “Kääntäjä katselee Kiveä” (A Translator Looks at Kivi),╇ 98, 107, 198–99, 203–4; Mielikuvituksen todellisuus (The Reality of the Imagination),╇ 42; Muistiinpanoja (Notes),╇ 42, 64–65, 201; Romaanitaide (The Art of the Novel),╇ 42, 61, 63, 67–68; “Sota ja ihminen” (War and the Human Being),╇ 63–64 translations: Fallen Asleep While Young (Sillanpää),╇ 54, 82–83, 88; Kun tein kuolemaa (Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying),╇ x, 42, 55, 68, 77–80; “Legend of Young Odele and the Leper” (Kallas),╇ 80–81; Meek Heritage (Sillanpää),╇ 54, 83–85; Seven Brothers (Kivi),╇ x, 42–52, 54, 55, 62, 66–68, 79, 82, 85, 86, 101–11; Taiteilijan omakuva nuoÂ� ruuden vuosilta (Joyce’s Portrait)╇ 55, 68–72; Villipalmut (Faulkner’s Wild Palms),╇ x, 42, 55, 68, 72–77, 88 Maude, Louise and Aylmer,╇ 189–94 May, Rachel,╇ xi, 131–33, 140, 149

Metalinguistic level (Venuti),╇ 14, 150, 161 Method Acting,╇ 172–73 “Microtechniques of socialization” (Nancy Armstrong),╇ 35–36 Moncrieff, C. K. Scott,╇ 27, 41 Morson, Gary Saul,╇ 90, 166 Muir, Willa and Edwin,╇ 27, 30, 37, 41, 85 N Nabokov, Vladimir: on Dostoevsky’s “bad writing,”╇ 135, 147; translator of Pushkin,╇ 105, 150 Narrative theory (Baker),╇ ix– xii, 1, 13–15, 161–87, 189, 193–94; and narrativization,╇ 165, 167, 168 Network (Newman, Barabási, Watts),╇ 166 New Criticism, and Matson’s focus on form,╇ 63–68 Nida, Eugene,╇ 6, 95, 195 Niranjana, Tejaswini,╇ 114–15, 130 Novalis,╇ 123 Nuorena nukkunut (Sillanpää),╇ 54, 82–83 Nyman, Jopi, and Urpo Kovala,╇ 201 O Odyssey (Homer),╇ 127–28 On Christian Doctrine (Augustine),╇ 2–4 Ovid (translated by Dryden),╇ 18–19, 103 P Pathetic interpretant,╇ xi, 94, 96–97 Pathos (Aristotle),╇ 175–76; and the emotional interpretant,╇ 92–95 Peirce, Charles Sanders,╇ ix, 13, 14, 17, 20, 104, 132; and the abduction-inductiondeduction triad,╇ 206; on habit-change,╇ 28–31, 113, 125, 129; and the habitualization of interpretants,╇ 31, 37, 151; and the instinct-experience-habit triad,╇ 198, 206; on the inter-

pretant in general,╇ 23–29, 36–38, 181, 196–97, 198; on the emotional-energetic-logical interpretant triad,╇ 92–95, 166–68; on surprise,╇ 170 Pekkanen, Hilkka,╇ xii, 203 Perelman, Chaim, and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca,╇ 211 Performative identity, and the literary translator,╇ 108 Performativity (Austin),╇ 89, 166–67, 173 Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui, The (translated by Burton),╇ 106 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah (Burton),╇ 106 Pevear, Richard, and Larisa Volokhonsky,╇ xi, 131–59, 205–6 Phantom limb, and translation,╇ 115–17 Phenomenological fade of foreignism,╇ 113–15 Phenomenology: of cultural belonging and culture shock,╇ 169–73; of language proficiency,╇ 63, 108–11; of foreignism,╇ 113–15 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein),╇ 210 Pleasure: in translation,╇ 77, 99; and interplay with correctness,╇ 100–4 Pleasure of the Text, The (Barthes),╇ 39, 77, 96, 134 Polysystems,╇ 33–34 Pope, Marvin H.,╇ 5 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin),╇ 91, 140, 145–47, 156 Proprioception,╇ 118; of thought,╇ 118–19; and translation,╇ 116–22, 127–30 Proprioception of the body politics,╇ 119–20; and estrangement,╇ 123–27; theorized by Damasio,╇ 120–21; and translation,╇ 121–23, 127–30 Proust, Marcel,╇ 27, 41, 113 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The (Freud),╇ 12 Pushkin, Aleksandr,╇ 105, 150 Pym, Anthony,╇ 14, 107

 Translation and the Problem of Sway Q “Quasi-Mind that is the Interpreter, the” (Peirce),╇ 17, 23–25, 26, 37, 93, 132–33 R Randell, Elina,╇ 202 Rantavaara, Irma,╇ 50, 198–99 Rationalism: and communication theories,╇ 172; as sway, 8–11 Reagan, Ronald,╇ 177–78, 182–87 Rekola, Simo,╇ 201 “Relationship Between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices of Style, The” (Shklovsky),╇ 123–24 Resonance (Baker),╇ 177–78, 182–87 Rhetoric (Aristotle),╇ 89, 186, 210 Rhetorical identification (Burke),╇ 166 Rhetorical interpretant,╇ 99, 167; and explanation of genius translations,╇ 103; and logical/ pathetic axis,╇ 101; as Urinterpretant,╇ 89 Rhetorical situation,╇ 174–87, 193; as performativity,╇ 89 Rhys, Brian,╇ 54, 81 Riikonen, Hannu,╇ 202 Robinson, Douglas: Becoming a Translator,╇ 197, 206; Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature,╇ 123, 155, 182, 201, 206; Heath Cobblers (Kivi),╇ 49, 102; Introducing Performative Pragmatics,╇ 203; “Kugelmass, Translator,”╇ 201; Pentinpeijaiset,╇ 153–54; Performative Linguistics,╇ 89, 91, 93, 100, 196, 197; “Translation and the/as Phantom Limb,”╇ 115–17, 122, 129; “The Translator Always Adds a Voice or Two,”╇ 156; The Translator’s Turn,╇ ix, 36–37, 121, 125, 152; What Is Translation?,╇ 115; Who Translates?,╇ 8 Rodnaya Rech’ (Vail’ and Genis),╇ 138 Russian Formalists,╇ 113 Ruth 3:4 (galah margelah as “uncover the feet”),╇ 4–7

S Saarikoski, Pentti,╇ 55, 79, 122, 202 Saarimaa, E.A.,╇ 49 Sacks, Oliver,╇ 116–17 Savolainen, Matti,╇ 201, 202 Schlegel brothers,╇ 123 Schleiermacher, Friedrich,╇ ix, 115, 123, 130, 157, 173 Schore, Allan N.,╇ 210–11 Seitsemän veljestä (Kivi),╇ x; translated as Seven Brothers by Impola,╇ 42, 59–61; translated as Seven Brothers by Matson,╇ 42–52, 54, 55, 62, 66–68, 79, 82, 85, 86, 101–11; see also Matson Semiotic theory,╇ 23–32, 193–94 Septuagint,╇ 2–4, 6–7 Sevastopol Stories (Tolstoy/ Maudes),╇ 189–92, 194 Seven Brothers (Kivi): see Seitsemän veljestä Shakespeare, William,╇ 52, 58, 98 Shklovsky, Viktor,╇ 113, 123–27, 206 Shohat, Ella,╇ 169–71 Shuttleworth, Mark,╇ 33 Signifying chain (Lacan),╇ 28, 197 Sillanpää, F.E.,╇ x, 42, 54, 82–85, 86, 88, 89, 99, 100, 203 Skopos,╇ 189, 193 Social regulation,╇ ix, 31–32; through feelings,╇ 20 Somatic exchange,╇ 32, 90, 120–21, 168–73 Somatics,╇ x, 166; in interpreting,╇ 171–73; of literature╇ 125; of translation╇ 36–37 Somers, Margaret R., and Gloria D. Gibson,╇ 13, 165, 174 Sorvali, Irma, and Kaisa Häkkinen,╇ 201 “Sota ja ihminen” (Matson),╇ 63–64 Stolze, Radegundis,╇ 29–30, 132 Structuralism: and depersonalization,╇ 25–26, 77; and foreignism,╇ 113–15 “Structure of Fiction, The” (Shklovsky),╇ 125 Structures of feeling (Williams),╇ 35, 167 Sudenmorsian (Kallas),╇ 54 Sway,╇ x; and bias,╇ 13; and divine

inspiration,╇ 3; and group dynamics,╇ 8–11, 13; of ideology,╇ 19–20; and the interpretant,╇ 25; as “irresistible pull of irrational behavior” (Brafmans),╇ 8–11; and kneejerk literalism,╇ 8; and norms,╇ 13; and our sense of our command of a language,╇ 63; and social psychology,╇ 193; by source text,╇ 17–18 Sway (Brafmans),╇ x, 7–11, 133, 178, 195 T Täällä pohjantähden alla (Linna),╇ 60 Tarkiainen, Viljo,╇ 52 Terras, Victor,╇ 147–49 Thematic interpretant (Venuti),╇ xi, 14, 85, 87, 92, 150 Theory of Prose (Shklovsky/ Sher),╇ 123–26 Theory of Semiotics, A (Eco),╇ 13, 20, 23–27, 38 Thou and thee, in Garnett,╇ 147– 49; in Matson,╇ 46–47, 58, 149 Tolstoy, Leo,╇ 189–94 Toulmin, Stephen,╇ 175, 178–82, 209–10 Toury, Gideon,╇ x, 1–2, 11–12, 17–18, 95, 195, 196 Transcendental values (Fisher/ Baker),╇ 172, 208 Translation and Conflict (Baker),╇ 161–87 Translation Studies and beyond (Toury),╇ 196 Translation, and bias╇ 1–2, 189; and error,╇ 1–7, 189; and norms,╇ 1–2, 11–13, 189, 196 Translator in the Text, The (May),╇ 131–33, 140 Translator intercultures, and cultural belonging,╇ 107–8 Tuntematon sotilas (Linna),╇ 42, 54, 202 U Umgang (Stolze),╇ 29–30, 132, 138, 150; and style,╇ 99, 154 “Uncover the feet,” translation of galah margelah (Ruth 3:4),╇ 4–7



Index  Unknown Soldier (Linna/ Anon),╇ 42, 54, 60, 63–64, 202 Urquhart, Sir Thomas,╇ 103, 111 Uses of Argument, The (Toulmin),╇ 178, 210 V Vail’, Pyotr, and Aleksandr Genis,╇ 138, 147 Value-attribution (Brafmans),╇ 7, 150 Varpio, Yrjö,╇ xii, 55, 57, 62, 198 Venuti, Lawrence,╇ ix–xii, 197; on Dostoevsky,╇ 131–35,

157–59; on the interpretant,╇ 7, 13–15, 17–18, 20–39, 92, 104, 113, 130, 149, 152, 161–63, 165, 181; on foreignism,╇ xi, 14, 42, 50–51, 77, 79–80, 85–87, 114–15, 129, 131–35, 151; and Brecht,╇ 155; on the thematic and formal interpretants,╇ xi, 14, 85, 87, 92, 150, 189 Verfremdungseffekt (Brecht),╇ 155 “Vision contained in the original form, the” (Matson),╇ 65– 68, 101 Voloshinov, Valentin,╇ 90, 99

W Walker, Jeffrey,╇ 210 War Stories (Tolstoy),╇ 190 Warrant (Toulmin),╇ 178–82 Wechsler, Robert,╇ 173 Welby, Lady,╇ 27–28, 94 White, Hayden,╇ 166 Williams, Raymond,╇ 35, 36 Wittgenstein, Ludwig,╇ 34, 38, 209–10; on being guided, 32, 197–98