The translator’s invisibility is also partly determined by the individualistic conception of authorship that continues to prevail in Anglo-American culture. According to this conception, the author freely expresses his thoughts and feelings in writing, which is thus viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, {7} unmediated by transindividual determinants (linguistic, cultural, social) that might complicate authorial originality. This view of authorship carries two disadvantageous implications for the translator. On the one hand, translation is defined as a second-order representation: only the foreign text can be original, an authentic copy, true to the author’s personality or intention, whereas the translation is derivative, fake, potentially a false copy. On the other hand, translation is required to efface its second-order status with transparent discourse, producing the illusion of authorial presence whereby the translated text can be taken as the original. However much the individualistic conception of authorship devalues translation, it is so pervasive that it shapes translators’ self-presentations, leading some to psychologize their relationship to the foreign text as a process of identification with the author. The American Willard Trask (1900–1980), a major twentieth-century translator in terms of the quantity and cultural importance of his work, drew a clear distinction between authoring and translating. When asked in a late interview whether “the impulse” to translate “is the same as that of someone who wants to write a novel” (a question that is clearly individualistic in its reference to an authorial “impulse”), Trask replied:
No, I wouldn’t say so, because I once tried to write a novel. When you’re writing a novel […] you’re obviously writing about people or places, something or other, but what you are essentially doing is expressing yourself. Whereas when you translate you’re not expressing yourself. You’re performing a technical stunt. […] I realized that the translator and the actor had to have the same kind of talent. What they both do is to take something of somebody else’s and put it over as if it were their own. I think you have to have that capacity. So in addition to the technical stunt, there is a psychological workout, which translation involves: something like being on stage. It does something entirely different from what I think of as creative poetry writing.
In Trask’s analogy, translators playact as authors, and translations pass for original texts. Translators are very much aware that any sense of authorial presence in a translation is an illusion, an effect of transparent discourse, comparable to a “stunt,” but they nonetheless assert that they participate in a “psychological” relationship with the {8} author in which they repress their own “personality.” “I guess I consider myself in a kind of collaboration with the author,” says American translator Norman Shapiro; “Certainly my ego and personality are involved in translating, and yet I have to try to stay faithful to the basic text in such a way that my own personality doesn’t show” (Kratz 1986:27).
The translator’s invisibility is thus a weird self-annihilation, a way of conceiving and practicing translation that undoubtedly reinforces its marginal status in Anglo-American culture. For although the past twenty years have seen the institution of translation centers and programs at British and American universities, as well as the founding of translation committees, associations, and awards in literary organizations like the Society of Authors in London and the PEN American Center in New York, the fact remains that translators receive minimal recognition for their work—including translators of writing that is capable of generating publicity (because it is prizewinning, controversial, censored). The typical mention of the translator in a review takes the form of a brief aside in which, more often than not, the transparency of the translation is gauged. This, however, is an infrequent occurrence. Ronald Christ has described the prevailing practice: “many newspapers, such as The Los Angeles Times, do not even list the translators in headnotes to reviews, reviewers often fail to mention that a book is a translation (while quoting from the text as though it were written in English), and publishers almost uniformly exclude translators from book covers and advertisements” (Christ 1984:8). Even when the reviewer is also a writer, a novelist, say, or a poet, the fact that the text under review is a translation may be overlooked. In 1981, the American novelist John Updike reviewed two foreign novels for The New Yorker, Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller and Günter Grass’s The Meeting at Telgte, but the lengthy essay made only the barest reference to the translators. Their names appeared in parentheses after the first mention of the English-language titles. Reviewers who may be expected to have a writerly sense of language are seldom inclined to discuss translation as writing.
The translator’s shadowy existence in Anglo-American culture is further registered, and maintained, in the ambiguous and unfavorable legal status of translation, both in copyright law and in actual contractual arrangements. British and American law defines translation as an “adaptation” or “derivative work” based on an “original work of authorship,” whose copyright, including the {9} exclusive right “to prepare derivative works” or “adaptations,” is vested in the “author.”[3] The translator is thus subordinated to the author, who decisively controls the publication of the translation during the term of the copyright for the “original” text, currently the author’s lifetime plus fifty years. Yet since authorship here is defined as the creation of a form or medium of expression, not an idea, as originality of language, not thought, British and American law permits translations to be copyrighted in the translator’s name, recognizing that the translator uses another language for the foreign text and therefore can be understood as creating an original work (Skone James et al. 1991; Stracher 1991). In copyright law, the translator is and is not an author.[4]
The translator’s authorship is never given full legal recognition because of the priority given to the foreign writer in controlling the translation—even to point of compromising the translator’s rights as a British or American citizen. In subscribing to international copyright treaties like the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the United Kingdom and the United States agree to treat nationals of other member countries like their own nationals for purposes of copyright (Scarles 1980:8–11). Hence, British and American law holds that an English-language translation of a foreign text can be published only by arrangement with the author who owns the copyright for that text—i.e., the foreign writer, or, as the case may be, a foreign agent or publisher. The translator may be allowed the authorial privilege to copyright the translation, but he or she is excluded from the legal protection that authors enjoy as citizens of the UK or US in deference to another author, a foreign national. The ambiguous legal definition of translation, both original and derivative, exposes a limitation in the translator’s citizenship, as well as the inability of current copyright law to think translation across national boundaries despite the existence of international treaties. The Berne Convention (Paris 1971) at once assigns an authorial right to the translator and withdraws it: “Translations, adaptations, arrangements of music and other alterations of a literary or artistic work shall be protected as original works without prejudice to the copyright in the original work” held by the foreign “author,” who “shall enjoy the exclusive right of making and of authorising the translation” (articles 2(3), 8).[5] Copyright law does not define a space for the translator’s authorship that is equal to, or in any way restricts, the foreign author’s rights. And yet it acknowledges that there is a material basis to warrant some such restriction.
[3]
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (c.48), sections 1 (1) (a), 16 (1) (e), 21(3) (a) (i); 17 US Code, sections 101, 102, 106, 201 (a) (1976).
[4]
The ambiguous legal status of translation is discussed by Derrida 1985a: 196–200 and Simon 1989.
[5]
The UNESCO Recommendation on the Legal Protection of Translators and Translations and the Practical Means to Improve the Status of Translators (adopted by the General Conference at Nairobi, 22 November 1976), follows the wording of the Berne Convention:
Member states should accord to translators, in respect of their translations, the protection accorded to authors under the provisions of the international copyright conventions to which they are party and/ or under their national laws, but without prejudice to the rights of the authors of the original works translated.