The Translator's Visibility

Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction

Heather Cleary

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501353703
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Literatur
• Sous-sujet: Literaturkritik

At the intersection of translation studies and Latin American literary studies, The Translator's Visibility examines contemporary novels by a cohort of writers – including prominent figures such as Cristina Rivera Garza, César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Valeria Luiselli, and Luis Fernando Verissimo – who foreground translation in their narratives. Drawing on Latin America's long tradition of critical and creative engagement of translation, these novels explicitly, visibly, use major tropes of translation theory – such as gendered and spatialized metaphors for the practice, and the concept of untranslatability – to challenge the strictures of intellectual property and propriety while shifting asymmetries of discursive authority, above all between the original as a privileged repository of meaning and translation as its hollow emulation. In this way, The Translator's Visibility show that translation not only serves to renew national literatures through an exchange of ideas and forms; when rendered visible, it can help us reimagine the terms according to which those exchanges take place. Ultimately, it is a book about language and power: not only the ways in which power wields language, but also the ways in which language can be used to unseat power.

1

Monsters and Parricides

Translation is the language of planets and monsters.

— Emily Apter, The Translation Zone

In the court of public opinion, translation faces a number of catchy indictments. Along with the appealingly consonant traduttore, traditore, the blithely anthropomorphic characterization belles infidèles suggests that translations—like women—can be either beautiful or faithful, but never both.¹ As Lori Chamberlain so compellingly observed, the libidinal anxiety evinced by this bon mot maps directly onto questions of legal legitimacy, both domestic and intellectual: whether expressed in Roscommon’s genteel rhetoric of guardianship or George Steiner’s sexualized terms of conquest, these gendered notions of translation reinforce, through a “cultural complicity between the issues of fidelity in translation and in marriage,” the hierarchical system according to which a translation is publicly tried for crimes “an original (as husband, father, or author) … is by law incapable of committing” (1988: 456).²

Like so many moral imperatives, these injunctions against inter-linguistic dalliance are not purely principled. With the inception of copyright in the early eighteenth century, the enforcement of intellectual propriety takes on a proprietary dimension, mimicking a “kinship system where paternity” or the masculinized act of creation “legitimizes an offspring” (1988: 456). In the domestic sphere, this legitimation is of principal importance to the transfer of title, to determining who is both responsible for and beneficiary of a property. The threat that lurks behind infidelity, then, on both the domestic and the literary level, is that of confusing or defusing these lines of descent and, subsequently, the categories of ownership that they uphold. When intellectual lineage—grounded either in a metaphorics that echoes sexual reproduction, whereby a masculine author-original begets a derivative, feminized, and potentially “treasonous” translation, or in the carbon-copy model presented by the rhetoric of cloning—is challenged by a translation that asserts its own creativity, the result is often rejected as illegitimate or monstrous.

Sometimes this monstrosity is shockingly … cute. At least, it would be hard to describe the premise of Julio Cortázar’s 1951 short story “Carta a una señorita en París” [“Letter to a Young Lady in Paris”] any other way. For Cortázar, who was himself a translator—he brought the work of Poe, Chesterton, Gide, and Yourcenar, among others, into Spanish, and translated for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) during his years in Paris—translation and the negotiation of cultural and linguistic difference was a recurring theme.³ The letter of the story’s title is written by a translator who—in a spatialized metaphor of the dynamics of his profession—lives in one borrowed home after another. He is currently occupying a property in a well-heeled neighborhood of Buenos Aires that has been lent to him by a young woman named Andrea while she is away in Paris. As Rosemary Arrojo observes in her analysis of the story, this apartment serves as a metaphor for an original text into which the translator must insert himself: the space and all the objects contained therein are organized according to “un orden cerrado, construido ya hasta en las más finas mallas del aire” (2011: 17) [a compact order, built even to the finest nets of air (1998: 8)], where the narrator observes that everything “parece tan natural, como siempre que no se sabe la verdad” (18) [looks so natural, as always when one does not know the truth (8)]. The same way everything looks so natural when one accepts an author’s narrative as a pure, unmediated account of their experience: a willing suspension of disbelief rarely afforded translations.

The first disruption of this carefully constructed order is the translator’s replacement of a small metal tray with his English dictionaries, to keep them in easy reach; he feels great distress at needing to make this adjustment, and writes that moving the tray “altera el juego de relaciones de toda la casa, de cada objeto con otro, de cada momento de su alma con el alma entera de la casa y su habitante lejana” (2011: 18) [alters the play of relationships in the whole house, of each object with another, of each moment of their soul with the soul of the house and its absent inhabitant (1998: 8)]. No matter how hard he might try, the translator-tenant cannot help but leave his mark on the luxurious text-space he occupies, and the awareness of his own presence disturbs him.

Changing the place of a silver tray would hardly be anything to write home (or Paris) about, but the narrator of this story suffers from an unusual pathology that makes it impossible for him to occupy Andrea’s property without leaving a trace: he periodically vomits up a small rabbit. Before he moved in, this would only happen once a month or so, leaving him plenty of time to give the animals away and keep their number under control. In the elevator on the day he arrives, however, the translator feels a little ball of fluff rising in his throat and he births the animal from his mouth.⁴ The first rabbit is followed by another and another, until he finds himself in the uncomfortable position of needing to hide a dozen bunnies from his hostess’s housekeeper and to repair the damage they’re doing to her home—most notably, to her extensive library. After chewing through the spines of the books on the bottom shelf, they’ve moved up to the second. The flustered translator has no choice but to turn the books around, lest they be ruined.

In this elaborate metaphor of translation and its (illicit) relationship to authorship, these archetypically fertile little creatures stand in for the translator’s creative impulse: an inconvenient presence that erupts within—and inevitably, inexorably, alters—the pristine and privileged sphere of the authored text. The translator first attempts to conceal the destruction, but his solution of repasting the book’s bindings doesn’t last long. “Anoche,” he writes, “di vuelta a los libros del segundo estante; alcanzaban ya a ellos, parándose o saltando, royeron los lomos para afilarse los dientes” (2011: 27) [Last night, I turned the books on the second shelf in the other direction; they were already reaching that high, standing on their hind legs or jumping, they gnawed off the backs to sharpen their teeth (1998: 14)]. As the animals multiply and “sharpen their teeth” on the space of authorial attribution, the translator resorts to turning the books around, preserving the authorial mark but rendering it invisible, further confusing the provenance of the ideas contained within. The story ends on a tragic note when the narrator, realizing that he has lost control of the rabbits (his overactive creative impulse) and that he is taking up more and more space, being more and more visible, decides to end his life by jumping from the balcony of Andrea’s opulent apartment. This guilt, we are to understand, arises from his discovering himself so fecund and not, as is expected of his office, merely the vehicle of another’s creativity.⁵

The connection between property, propriety, and textual filiation is already present in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s foundational 1813 lecture, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” in which the philosopher presents opposition between bringing the author to the reader (by making the forms of expression familiar to her) or bringing the reader to the author (by stretching the limits of the target language to accommodate structures from the source language).⁶ According to Schleiermacher, this presents a real impasse for the translator. “Who would not like to make his native tongue appear everywhere displaying the most splendid characteristic beauty allowed by each genre?” he asks, before veering into a succession of metaphors that touch on the themes of lineage, property, and propriety (and the violence that runs through them all).

Who would not prefer to beget children who would purely represent their fathers’ lineage, rather than mongrels? … Who would gladly consent to be considered ungainly for striving to adhere so closely to the foreign tongue as his own language allows, and to being criticized, like parents who entrust their children to tumblers for their education, for having failed to exercise his mother tongue in the sorts of gymnastics native to it, instead accustoming it to alien, unnatural contortions!

(2012: 53)

For Schleiermacher, translation is a family affair—and a fraught one, at that: it is striking how, in his attempt to find language for the translator’s battle of aesthetic allegiances, his metaphors pile up and tangle the line of descent. First, the translator sires a form of language that risks accusations of being an ill-born “mongrel”—translated by Waltraud Bartscht in another edition of the text as “bastard,” an interpretation that places greater emphasis on the themes of inheritance and lineage here explored, even as it misses the inflection of admixture so notable in the German “Blendlinge.”⁷ In the next image, the translator is again a parent figure, albeit a negligent one: rather than infidelity, the translator is now accused of giving the fruit of his labors-or-loins away to the circus, subjecting it to unnatural linguistic contortions (Verrenkungen). The series of metaphors ends with a marked generational slippage, whereby the transgressions of and against the child become an act of violence visited upon the mother tongue, specifically identified as such (Muttersprache).⁸

It is hardly a stretch to read these generational contortions through a Freudian lens, as Harold Bloom did in The Anxiety of Influence, claiming that authors view their predecessors according to the model of “father and son” facing off “as mighty opposites” (1973: 11).⁹ These Oedipal dynamics prominent throughout are echoed in the gendered and reproductive metaphors examined in this chapter, and is also notable in the translation theory of the Brazilian translator, poet, and critic Haroldo de Campos, who describes the practice in terms of filiation, transgression, and violence as “a parricidal dis-memory.”¹⁰ In his model, translation—specifically through its ties to the notion of intellectual inheritance—is the lever by which entrenched cultural hierarchies are overturned.

In their engagement of these filial dynamics through gendered or reproductive tropes of translation theory, the contemporary writers examined in this chapter not only create translator figures that establish themselves as “mighty opposites” to the authors they engage; some go a step further to posit these intercultural, intertextual relations as rhizomatic, rather than linear, phenomena that challenge the hierarchical dynamics outlined above. At their most extreme, these narratives center on figures of monstrosity and excess that—rather than serving as cautionary tales—undermine hierarchical notions of intellectual influence by erasing “the difference between production and reproduction which is essential to the establishment of power” (Chamberlain 1988: 466). These writers—who include Graciela Safranchik, Luis Fernando Verissimo, and César Aira—replace filial deference with parricidal defiance, creating the conditions necessary for a reconfiguration of the dyads of original and copy, creation and derivation, center and periphery.

I. Tea for One

The translator protagonist of Argentinean critic and playwright Graciela Safranchik’s largely overlooked 1995 novella El cangrejo [The crab] shares with Cortázar’s nomadic, rabbit-vomiting narrator a deep sense of isolation and a penchant for self-effacement. This short text centers on Akinari, a translator from the Japanese who specializes in invisible authors, those who have been “olvidados por la industria editorial” (Safranchik 1995: 45) [forgotten by the publishing industry]; he cherishes the “tarea solitaria” (45) [solitary task] of translation, and considers it compensation for the hours he spends teaching in order to pay his bills. Akinari dedicates the lion’s share of his intellectual efforts—such as they are before he falls into the paralysis of an all-consuming infatuation with a woman he sees one day at his regular café—to the work of a seminal eighteenth-century Japanese scholar and writer named Ueda Akinari; this denominative doubling of the author by the translator is touched upon in various ways throughout. According to the narrator, Ueda was “totalmente eclipsado” (21) [completely eclipsed] by his work during his lifetime, and further dissipated his authorial presence by adopting multiple pseudonyms, which few scholars aside from his namesake translator ever traced back to him. As Akinari becomes more and more invested in Ueda’s work, he begins to adopt these pseudonyms in his own scholarly writing, eclipsing himself in turn.

Like these bodies of work that flit into and out of visibility, the object of Akinari’s desire, Miranda, is also an invisible being—even as her name evokes the notion of sight through its resonance with the Spanish verb “mirar,” the act of looking or watching. In fact, the first time Akinari sees her, he doesn’t: her face is deformed by an intense light shining on it from above. Rather than diminishing his impression of her, this distortion makes her even more appealing in Akinari’s eyes. Miranda is later described as having “una forma muy extraña de moverse … Como una muñeca” (Safranchik 1995: 13) [a strange way of moving … Like a doll], and this observation arouses Akinari even more. Her gaze is “diáfana” (30) [diaphanous], her hair is “vaporosa,” and her skin is “de una transparencia inusual” (32) [vaporous; unusually transparent]; her presence is so ephemeral that Akinari wonders, after fleeing the café in a state of emotional turmoil, if she ever existed in the first place, or if he invented her. This disturbing characterization culminates in the narrator’s observation that Miranda’s features seem like drawings, and he “tuvo la sensación de que él mismo podía modificarlos a su antojo” (32) [he sensed he could modify them as he wished].

Just as the invisibility and mutability of Akinari and Miranda resonate with tropes of solitude and sterility that posit the translator as a body which cannot create a lineage of his own, there is also a textual sterility tied up in the structure of his desire for her. Not only does Akinari’s work come crashing to a halt as he progressively loses himself to his infatuation with Miranda, he fantasizes about writing her letters in the specific hope that she never responds to them (44). Like the ephemeral image he constructs of the object of his desire, his missives of love are by design instances of linguistic onanism, pure projection.

This linguistic sterility turns out to be genetic: though Akinari’s father had been a language instructor, his mother—for whom Japanese was a second language—was prone to verbal externalizations that never became communication, simply repeating words “como quien acomodaba flores en un ramo” (Safranchik 1995: 67–8) [like someone arranging flowers in a bouquet]. From that union came Akinari, “el bromista, el gran farfullador” (69) [the joker, the great stammerer]. These monikers, of course, are not his: they belong to the other Akinari—Ueda—whose own family tree is even more gnarled. In keeping with scholarly accounts of Ueda’s life, the novel states that the scholar and poet was taken in as a young child by wealthy merchants, according to a practice whereby any family unable to produce a male heir would simply adopt one (38). This fact illuminates and complicates one of the pseudonyms Ueda assigns himself, which in turn ties directly to the tropes examined in this chapter: Tarô the translator. As Akinari points out, Tarô is a name assigned to a family’s firstborn, but “que habitualmente está asociado a Jirô y a Saburô, el Segundo y el tercer hijo” (38) [which usually appears alongside a Jirô and a Saburô, a second and third son]. As a result, “Ueda se presentaba como el mayor de un montón inexistente de hermanos de una familia que no les daba nombre, sino que se limitaba a contarlos” (38) [Ueda presented himself as the eldest among a bunch of nonexistent siblings in a family that doesn’t give them names, simply counting them instead]. In this way, Ueda’s assumed name—which is in turn assumed by Akinari—puts emphasis on the gaps in the family line, on the fact that, as a transplant, his roots barely enter the soil of the family tree to which he is now attached.

The association of chimeric kinship and fragmented lineage with the identity of the translator is reinforced by the juxtaposition of this moniker with another key pseudonym used by Ueda—one Akinari is too intimidated to adopt because in it he can feel the “presencia ominosa de su predecesor” (Safranchik 1995: 22) [ominous presence of his predecessor] weighing on him “como una amenaza” (22) [like a threat]. It is the pseudonym that provides the novel’s title: El cangrejo [The crab]. Standing in clear opposition to the accumulating images of solitude and sterility, the Crab represents a virile, creative energy. It is the most authorial of the author’s signs, the one align...