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The Translator’s Invisibility

A History of Translation

by Lawrence Venuti

General editors’ preface

The growth of translation studies as a separate discipline is a success story of the 1980s. The subject has developed in many parts of the world and is clearly destined to continue developing well into the twenty-first century. Translation studies brings together work in a wide variety of fields, including linguistics, literary study, history, anthropology, psychology, and economics. This series of books will reflect the breadth of work in translation studies and will enable readers to share in the exciting new developments that are taking place at the present time.

Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever their intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate literature to function in a given society in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation, undertaken in the service of power, and in its positive aspect can help in the evolution of a literature and a society. Rewritings can introduce new concepts, new genres, new devices, and the history of translation is the history also of literary innovation, of the shaping power of one culture upon another. But rewriting can also repress innovation, distort and contain, and in an age of ever increasing manipulation of all kinds, the study of the manipulative processes of literature as exemplified by translation can help us toward a greater awareness of the world in which we live.

Since this series of books on translation studies is the first of its kind, it will be concerned with its own genealogy. It will publish texts from the past that illustrate its concerns in the present, and will publish texts of a more theoretical nature immediately addressing those concerns, along with case studies illustrating manipulation through rewriting in various literatures. It will be comparative in nature and will range through many literary traditions, both Western and non-Western. Through the {viii} concepts of rewriting and manipulation, this series aims to tackle the problem of ideology, change and power in literature and society and so assert the central function of translation as a shaping force.

Susan Bassnett
André Lefevere

Preface and acknowledgements

The Translator’s Invisibility originates in my own work as a professional translator since the late 1970s. But any autobiographical elements are subsumed in what is effectively a history of English-language translation from the seventeenth century to the present. My project is to trace the origins of the situation in which every English-language translator works today, although from an opposing standpoint, with the explicit aim of locating alternatives, of changing that situation. The historical narratives presented here span centuries and national literatures, but even though based on detailed research, they are necessarily selective in articulating key moments and controversies, and frankly polemical in studying the past to question the marginal position of translation in contemporary Anglo-American culture. I imagine a diverse audience for the book, including translation theorists, literary theorists and critics, period specialists in various literatures (English-language and foreign), and reviewers of translations for periodicals, publishers, private foundations, and government endowments. Most of all, I wish to speak to translators and readers of translations, both professional and nonprofessional, focusing their attention on the ways that translations are written and read and urging them to think of new ones.

A project with this sort of intention and scope will inevitably come to rely on the help of many people in different fields of literary and critical expertise. Assembling the list of those who over the past several years read, discussed, criticized, or otherwise encouraged my work is a special pleasure, making me realize, once again, how fortunate I was: Antoine Berman, Charles Bernstein, Shelly Brivic, Ann Caesar, Steve Cole, Tim Corrigan, Pellegrino D’Acierno, Guy Davenport, Deirdre David, Milo De Angelis, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, George Economou, Jonathan Galassi, Dana Gioia, Barbara Harlow, Peter Hitchcock, Susan Howe, Suzanne Jill Levine, Philip Lewis, Harry Mathews, Jeremy {x} Maule, Sally Mitchell, Daniel O’Hara, Toby Olson, Douglas Robinson, Stephen Sartarelli, Richard Sieburth, Alan Singer, Nigel Smith, Susan Stewart, Robert Storey, Evelyn Tribble, William Van Wert, Justin Vitiello, William Weaver, Sue Wells, and John Zilcosky. Others assisted me by providing useful and sometimes essential information: Raymond Bentman, Sara Goldin Blackburn, Robert E.Brown, Emile Capouya, Cid Corman, Rob Fitterman, Peter Glassgold, Robert Kelly, Alfred MacAdam, Julie Scott Meisami, M.L.Rosenthal, Susanne Stark, Suzanna Tamminen, Peter Tasch, Maurice Valency, and Eliot Weinberger. Of course none of these people can be held responsible for what I finally made of their contributions.

For opportunities to share this work with various audiences in the United States and abroad, I thank Carrie Asman, Joanna Bankier, Susan Bassnett, Cedric Brown, Craig Eisendrath, Ed Foster, Richard Alan Francis, Seth Frechie and Andrew Mossin, Theo Hermans, Paul Hernadi, Robert Holub, Sydney Lévy, Gregory Lucente, Carol Maier, Marie-José Minassian, Anu Needham, Yopie Prins, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Sherry Simon, William Tropia, and Immanuel Wallerstein. I am grateful to the staffs of the libraries where much of the research was carried out: the British Library; the Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, University of California, San Diego; Rare Books and Manuscripts, Butler Library, Columbia University; the Library Company, Philadelphia; the Nottingham City Archive; the Inter-Library Loan Department, Paley Library, Temple University; and the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. I am especially thankful to Bett Miller of the Archive for New Poetry, who did a special job of helping me secure copies of many documents in the Paul Blackburn Collection, and to Adrian Henstock of the Nottingham City Archive, who enabled me to consult Lucy Hutchinson’s commonplace book. Philip Cronenwett, Chief of Special Collections at Dartmouth College Library, kindly answered my questions about the Ramon Guthrie papers.

Various individuals and institutions have granted permission to quote from the following copyrighted materials: Excerpts from Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation, copyright © 1958 by The Regents of the University of California, © renewed 1984 by Mary Barnard; and from Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir, copyright © 1984 by Mary Barnard.

Excerpts from Paul Blackburn’s correspondence, translations, and nonfiction, copyright © 1995 by Joan Miller-Cohn. Excerpts from {xi} The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn, copyright © 1985 by Joan Blackburn. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc.

Excerpts from the writings of Macmillan employees: editor Emile Capouya’s letter to John Ciardi, Capouya’s letter to Ramon Guthrie, Guthrie’s report on Paul Blackburn’s Anthology of Troubadour Poetry. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan College Publishing Company, New York: 1958. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from End of the Game and Other Stories by Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn, copyright © 1967 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Excerpts from “Translator’s Preface” by Robert Fagles, from Homer: The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles, translation copyright © 1990 by Robert Fagles. Introduction and notes copyright © 1990 by Bernard Knox. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc.

Excerpts from Poems from the Greek Anthology, translated by Dudley Fitts, copyright © 1938, 1941, 1956, by New Directions Publishing Corporation.