Translation and Creativity

Kirsten Malmkjær

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317302551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Kirsten Malmkjær argues that translating can and should be considered a valuable art form. Examining notions of creativity and their relationship with translation and focusing on how the originality of translation is manifest in texts, the author explores a range of texts and their translations, in order to illustrate original as opposed to derivative translation.

With reference to thirty translators' discourses on their source texts and the author's own experience of translating a short text, Malmkjær explores the theory of creativity, philosophical aesthetics, the philosophy of language, experimental and theoretical translation studies, and translators' discourses on their work. Showing the relevance of these varied topics to the study of translating and translations underlines their complexity and the immensity of understanding that is regularly invested in translations.

This work proposes a complete rethinking of the concepts of creativity and originality, as applied to translation, and is vital reading for advanced students and researchers in translation studies and comparative literature.

1

Definitions of creativity

1.1 Introduction

In this chapter, I explore the concept of creativity and its relationship with notions such as genius, madness and danger, associations which tend to play a role in conceptions of art and artists.

Writing in Waitrose Weekend on 8 May 2014, Rachel Johnson presents ‘Mr Trotter, a portly porker dressed in a Union flag waistcoat’, whose image is being used to advertise beer – improbably, it might at first be thought, but it transpires that Mr Trotter began life, more logically, perhaps, as the poster boy for a make of pork scratchings, and that the beer being advertised is claimed to be ‘a perfect match’ for these. The beer is called Mr Trotter’s Chestnut Ale, and flavouring ale with chestnuts was, according to ‘co-creator of Mr Trotter, Matthew Fort, […] down to the genius of Rupert [Ponsenby]’ (p. 5).

The association between genius and creativity – here evidenced in the idea of flavouring ale with chestnuts – stems, albeit probably not directly in this case, from Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the creative imagination in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, revised 1787) and in the Critique of Judgement (1790). This is an account of creativity which has had a profound influence on Western conceptions of art and its nature, and which is cited regularly in work on creativity and related topics (see e.g. Danto 2013: ch 5; Doorly 2013: x; Gaut 2010; Katz-Buonincontro 2015; Summa 2017 among many others). Kant’s notion of the creative imagination is central in his aesthetics (Crawford 1982/2003: 143), and originality is central in his account of the creative imagination. In the Critique of Judgement (§ 46; italics in the original), Kant declares that ‘Genius is the talent (or natural gift) which gives the rule to art’. It is an ‘innate mental disposition’ required in order that ‘that for which no definite rule can be given’ (namely art), can be brought into existence. It is a talent, not ‘a mere aptitude for what can be learned by a rule’, and therefore ‘originality must be its first property’. Originality is the opposite of imitation, but learning is imitation, so art cannot be taught, whereas science can. As Kant puts it (§ 47):

Newton could make all his steps, from the first elements of geometry to his own great and profound discoveries, intuitively plain and definite as regards consequence, not only to himself but to everyone else. But a Homer or a Wieland cannot show how his ideas, so rich in fancy and yet so full of thought, come together in his head, simply because he does not know and therefore cannot teach others. In science, then, the greatest discoverer only differs in degree from his laborious imitator and pupil, but he differs specifically from him whom nature has gifted for beautiful art.

Here, Kant draws a sharp distinction between artists and scientists, and between a scientist’s step-wise reasoning from premises to conclusions and the more spontaneous, less orderly coming together of ideas in the mind of an artist. The steps in the scientist’s thought process, Kant believes, can be carefully listed and logically linked, and a sequentially ordered account can be provided of them. In principle, everyone can be told and come to understand how the scientist reached his or her conclusions from a set of premises, and an expert scientist’s activity differs only in degree, not in kind, from the activities of an apprentice scientist. In contrast, an artist’s mind differs in kind from that of the non-artist; the artist is innately ‘gifted’. There is no explaining how the artist arrived at his or her creation; even the artist ‘does not know himself how he has come by his ideas’. Either you are an artist or you are not, and artistic genius is not gradable.

In Kant’s conception, though, the artist and the scientist share the property of being lone workers – single individuals, generally developing their products on their own.

1.2 Kant’s ten characteristics of creativity

From this brief account of Kant’s immensely complex views, we can derive the following list of ten characteristics of creativity:

1.Creativity is one thing

2.Creativity is a special talent or gift

3.Creativity is an attribute of individuals

4.Creativity is an attribute of artists

5.Originality is a prerequisite of creativity

6.Creativity cannot be taught

7.There are no rules for creativity

8.Creativity produces fine art

9.Creativity occurs spontaneously

10.Creativity is innate

Kant’s enduring influence notwithstanding, his views and variants of them have of course not gone unchallenged. For example, Crawford (1982/2003: 156) thinks Kant is wrong to assume that Newton would have developed his theories ‘in ordered, intuitively plain and definite steps’. According to Crawford, Kant confuses ‘the order of discovery […] and the order of teaching or systematic exposition of truths already discovered’, and Crawford declares that he has ‘no confidence that mathematicians can tell us how they know how to begin an unobvious proof or construction any better than Homer or Wieland could have told us how their ideas came together in their heads’ (1982/2003: 157). As Crawford also points out, there is no reason to think that works of art may not be as carefully thought through as mathematical proofs, even though the justification of a conclusion is not their primary intention.

Consider Figures 1.1 and 1.2. Figure 1.1 shows Hilma af Klint’s painting Svanen (The swan) of 1915; Figure 1.2 shows Michael Ancher’s Vil han klare pynten? (Will he make it round the point?), painted around 1880 in oil on canvas.

Figure 1.1Hilma af Klint, Svanen (The swan), nr 17, group IX/SUW, series SUW/UW, 1915. Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. Photo: Moderna Museet/Albin Dahlström. This image is in the public domain.

Figure 1.2Michael Ancher (1849–1927), Vil han klare pynten? (Will he clear the point?) 1880 Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 79.5 cm, reproduced from www.skagensmuseum.dk/samlingen/vaerkerne/michael-ancher/pynten/.

The careful composition of these pictures, and very many like them, belies any idea that their creation was ‘spontaneous’ or ‘immediate’ in anything like the normal sense of these words. It is true that ‘Hilma af Klint [(1862–1944)] believed that when she was painting she was in contact with beings of higher dimensions of consciousness, and that these entities spoke and conveyed messages through her’ (Müller-Westerman 2013: 33); nevertheless, as Müller-Westerman (2013: 33) remarks, Hilma af Klint’s paintings evidence a ‘confident sense of composition’, and it is in fact deeply doubtful whether any work of art can be considered the product of pure spontaneity and immediacy (see also sections 1.4 and 1.6 below).

However, Crawford (2003: 157) is of course right that we should not take ‘the structure of the product to display the structure of the creative process’, including not taking the structure of a literary work or of its translation to display the structure of its writing/its translating. Both literary and non-literary translators return to their translations again and again, insofar as they have the time, changing previous decisions in the light of later ones, and in the light of further reflection, no doubt, as both translators’ own retrospection and empirical, onscreen experiments have shown (Shih, 2015; Göpferich, Jakobsen and Mees, 2008; see Chapter 3). It is incontrovertible that the process of creating a piece of art and the process of developing a scientific theory both take time and must proceed stepwise. The question that remains is whether they differ in the nature of their origin, that is, whether only certain, especially gifted individuals, whom we call artists, are able to produce art. Below, I will deal with this and each of the remaining Kantian thoughts on creativity in turn before relating the outcome of these discussions, in Chapter 2, to the question of whether translating is a creative endeavour.

First, though, it is important to return to the supposed connection between art (creativity), madness and danger flagged up in the introduction, an association that has proved curiously tenacious.

1.3 Madness, danger and art

The suggestion of a connection between madness, danger and creativity can be traced back at least as far as to Plato (c. 427–347), who, in The Republic (Books 2, 3 and 10), objects to poetry especially, but also to drama and visual art, because their objects are mere appearances; they are unreal, imitative representations, at one remove from the world of ordinary experience and therefore in Plato’s ontology twice removed from the forms that are things-in-themselves; and they appeal to the less rational parts of human nature:

Poetry has the […] effect [of allowing us to indulge in feelings we would normally try to control] when it represents sex and anger, and the other desires and feelings of pleasure and pain which accompany all our actions. It waters them when they ought to be left to wither, and makes them control us when we ought, in the interests of our own greater welfare and happiness, to control them […] The only poetry that should be allowed in a state is hymns to the gods and paeans in praise of good men; once you go beyond that and admit the sweet lyric or epic muse, pleasure and pain become your rulers instead of law and the rational principles commonly accepted as best.

(Book 10, 606–607; quotation from the Penguin Classics edition of 1974 ed. H. D. P. Lee, p. 437)

More worryingly, perhaps, in ‘On the Tranquility of the Mind’ – which, according to Rheinhardt (2007: xxii), ‘must have been written after Caligula’s death, and before 63, when the addressee of the work, Serenus, a high official at Nero’s court, died’ – Seneca (1–65) quotes Aristotle (384–322) as saying that ‘no great genius has ever existed without a dash of lunacy’, adding ‘whatever the truth, only the mind that is roused can utter something momentous that surpasses the thought of other men’ (Rheinhardt 2007: 139). According to Morro and Clark (1992: 191), this is a misquotation. However, other scholars quote Aristotle’s ‘Problemata xxx.i’ (fourth century, bce) which, in Ter Borg’s translation, asks, ‘Through what is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts turn out to be melancholics?’ Note that philosophers and politicians are included among the sufferers from melancholy here. Morro and Clark trace the association made between genius and madness by a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors (1992: 189), and Barrantes-Vidal (2004) traces it through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries during which, she points out, controlled experiments and investigations finally began to emerge. These have shown ‘a consistent association between the two [madness and creativity]’ (Barrantes-Vidal 2004: 74–75; italics in the original):

Both phenomena share common causative traits that make them go together. Substantial empirical work has shown that both creativity and the temperamental roots of psychoses have common features at a biological (e.g., high levels of dopamine), cognitive (e.g., a brain organisation characterised by a weak inhibitory control that enables loosened or more flexible styles of mental activity), and emotional level (e.g., high openness to experience and phases of elation and intense enthusiasm).

There is, then, some support for the suggestion of a connection between madness and creative genius that we seem to remain curiously tempted to make. For example, M. A. writes in The Economist (17 February 2016; see www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/02/art-and-mental-health) that

artists are mad geniuses, or so we like to think. They are seers, and mystics unfettered by the quotidian, connecting with the divine and reporting back. We connect madness and artistic talent so strongly that we use it as a proxy for determining the quality – and selling price – of an artwork. Shrewd artists have long known that the economic benefits of unkempt hair and erratic statements far outweigh those achieved with an extra year of painting lessons.

However, as the article goes on to make plain, in reality, being insane is unlikely to enhance one’s creativity, or, at least, it is likely to affect the products of one’s efforts adversely. This is illustrated by the example of the German composer Robert Schumann (1810–1856), who

was on the brink of madness when he composed his ‘Violin Concerto in D minor’ in 1853. The piece was rejected by its dedicatee, the violinist Joseph Joachim, as the product of a deranged mind, and it remained unpublished for 80 years.

Nevertheless, Kyaga et al. (2013: 83) discuss studies that have suggested that rather than full-on psychosis, less extreme disorders have been reported as potentially supportive of the creative process. These include so-called ‘nervous tensions’, being ‘given to drink or drug habits’, and ‘minor psychiatric disturbances’. Some studies suggest that bipolar disorder is more characteristic of scientists than of artists, but others have found ‘an increase of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia-like psychosis, depression, pathological anxiety, substance abuse and suicide among creative arts professions’ (Ludwig, 1992; Kyaga et al. 2013: 83–84). However, impressive as studies of the association between mental disorder and creativity are, Kyaga et al. (2013: 84) say that they have been ‘hampered by small cohorts, lack of standardized tools to assess creativity, or the use of retrospective biographies to establish diagnoses’. Their own study draws a distinction between creative writers and other creative artists because previous studies (Andreasen 1987; Jamison 1989; Post 1996) found a high incidence of psychopathology specifically in authors (Kyaga et al. 2013: 84). The distinction is of course especially helpful for the purposes of this book, the main aim of which is to discuss creativity in the context of translated writing.

Andreasen’s study of 30 members of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and 30 controls found no incidences of schizophrenia, but a majority of the writers had been treated for either bipolar illness or unipolar depression (Andreasen 2005: 94–95). These disorders tended to ‘be episodic, characterised by relatively brief periods of low or high mood lasting weeks to months, interspersed with long periods of normal mood’; and, as in Schumann’s case discussed above, Andreasen reports that her subjects consistently indicated ‘that they were unable to...