What is Translation?

Centrifugal Theories, Critical Interventions

Douglas Robinson

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612771441
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires

In What is Translation? Douglas Robinson investigates the present state of translation studies and looks ahead to the exciting new directions in which he sees the field moving. Reviewing the work of such theorists as Frederick Rener, Rita Copeland, Eric Cheyfitz, Andre Lefevere, Anthony Pym, Suzanne Jill Levine, Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz, Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti, and Philip E. Lewis, he both celebrates and critiques the last decade's work.

Since the mid-eighties, long-held ideas in translation scholarship have undergone dramatic revision, and Douglas Robinson has been a major figure in this transformation. A leader in a rapidly emerging "American" school of humanist/literary translation theory, he combines historical and literary scholarship with a highly personal, often anecdotal, style.

"Robinson's thinking about translation has always been extraordinarily original…In What is Translation? [he] continues to defy traditional conceptual thinking about translation….Many of the questions Robinson raises will have implications for the future development of the field of translation studies as well as repercussions beyond, " writes Edwin Gentzler in his foreword to the book.

What is Translation? Is the fourth volume of the Translation Studies series, which aims to present a broad spectrum of thinking on translation and to challenge our conceptions of what translation is and how we should think about it.

PART ONE

Remapping Rhetoric and Grammar

ONE

The Renaissance

Frederick M. Rener,
Interpretatio

THE NEW AND THE OLD

From the mid-eighties to the present, the study of translation has been renovated, rejuvenated. New paradigm-busting books appear every month, it seems, faster than most of us can read them. In a field that seemed given over to the compulsive repetition of the old (translate sense-for-sense, not word-for-word), in a field in which for centuries exciting new insights were as rare as hen’s teeth, suddenly everyone has something exciting and innovative to offer, some hard-won discovery that explodes this or that old chestnut, punctures this or that old pomposity, overturns this or that old cliché. Equivalence is a social fiction controlled by fleeting target-cultural norms. Translation is steeped in power relations, between men and women, between colonizers and the colonized, between academics and professionals. What next?

At the same time, however, the old does go on. And such has been the repressive force of “the old,” the conventional, the normative, the hegemonic, that even those centuries-old approaches have not yet been exhausted or even fully developed—that there are interesting discoveries yet to be made even within a universalized system of norms for translation that, as Frederick Rener claims, held sway for eighteen centuries, like the rhetoric/grammar approach. The three books discussed in this first section all explore that approach, in progressively more radical ways: Rener in its own terms, steadfastly refusing to import more modern (and thus anachronistic) theories into the study of rhetoric and grammar; Rita Copeland in structuralist terms, tracing conflicts in the approach that its practitioners themselves did not always see; and Eric Cheyfitz in poststructuralist and postcolonial terms, ripping open the soft underbelly of the approach to show its complicity (indeed, its origins) in imperialism.

Not surprisingly, Rener, Copeland, and Cheyfitz also cover roughly the same historical ground, the period during which Rener argues this approach was universally known and practiced, from classical Rome (Cicero to Quintilian) to the late nineteenth century—with Rener’s and Cheyfitz’s focus in the Renaissance and neoclassical period, Copeland’s in the Middle Ages. No more surprising, given the long dominance (since Jerome) of segmentation models for translation—is the proper translation segment the word (literal approaches) or the sentence (sense-for-sense approaches)?—is the polemical emphasis all three writers place on the organizing role played by rhetoric and grammar in discussions of translation. This is old—and yet until very recently who among twentieth-century theorists of translation has talked about it, or even thought about it?

Needless to say, that common historical and theoretical ground looks very different in the three books. What Rener shows us is a lockstep formal system that everyone of any “worth” from Cicero to Tytler knew and implicitly obeyed; anyone who didn’t know it or knew it but didn’t obey it has no place in Rener’s history. What Copeland shows us is the survival and remarkable transformations of a cultural rift between a worshipful (usually but not always ecclesiastical and academic) culture that wanted to preserve the foreign text precisely as it was and a more restless vernacular culture that wanted to make everything new. What Cheyfitz shows us is the European attempt to consolidate cultural and political power by domesticating the alien, colonizing the savage, from what he calls the “scene of colonization in [Cicero’s] De Inventione” (1991, 117) in 84 B.C. to Tarzan in A.D. 1912. What Rener formalizes as a monolithic system of linguistic norms and conventions, Copeland binarizes as a volatile tension between conflicting social groups, and Cheyfitz politicizes as a geopolitical will to power, a series of (increasingly successful) attempts to impose system on the “aimless wandering” of the “savage” (116).

THE SYSTEM

One of the strengths of Rener’s book, indeed, its raison d’être, is his mapping out of a unified theoretical foundation through the tangle of occasional and fragmentary pronouncements on translation. As he notes in his introduction, there is a twentieth-century scholarly tradition that denies the unity and even, in some cases, the very existence of translation theory prior to the Renaissance (or Dryden, or even our own century). This conception is clearly false, and Rener’s book is a massive and on the whole persuasive attempt to dislodge it. Through a Herculean research effort he has uncovered hundreds of previously forgotten, ignored, or neglected theoretical remarks on translation, through all of which, he shows, runs a single—though complex, many-stranded—scarlet thread: the classical theory of language based on the duality of grammar (“structure”) and rhetoric (“ornamentation”).

If you’ll indulge me, I think a fairly detailed look at his table of contents provides a good sense of what he is trying to accomplish: after a prologue that compares theories of the word as a single element (verba singula) to theories of the word as a component (verba coniuncta), he dives into part one on “Grammar: The Translator’s Basic Set of Tools”; part two will be “Rhetoric: The Translator’s Tools in Ornamentation.” Each part is divided into two sections, the first dealing with the general “domain”—“Grammar and Its Domain,” “Rhetoric and Its Domain”—the second with the translator’s specific applications of those domains: “The Translator as a Grammarian,” “The Translator and Rhetoric.” Because the system he is elucidating is what is commonly known as the building-block theory of language, the assumption throughout is that the writer or speaker or translator begins with minute elements and gradually builds them up into complex grammatical structures, which he then ornaments rhetorically for maximum impact on readers and hearers. There first is a domain, for example, then the translator uses it. Part three of Rener’s book is titled “Translation as Ars and the Translator as Artifex,” covering the nature of translation, translation and imitation, and the translator as a professional person.

Within each part and section, then, Rener deals with the minute elements that together make up the “domain” and its application. In “Grammar and Its Domain,” for example, he takes us through a series of key words, proprietas, puritas, consuetudo, vetustas, auctoritas, ratio (analogia), and perspicuitas, all of which are illustrations of verba singula; then etymologia as the focus of a discussion of “words as partes orationis” (parts of speech) and syntaxis as the focus of “words as verba coniuncta.” He also has a short chapter there on idioms. “The Translator as a Grammarian” deals with borrowing, neologism, circumlocution, and “etymological” problems involved in the translation of idioms and proverbs. In “Rhetoric and Its Domain” he covers the verba singula first, of course, especially tropes— starting with small blocks and moving to larger ones—then the verba coniuncta, especially figures and the periodic sentence, then style as both the ratione materiae and the ratione personae. In “The Translator and Rhetoric” he discusses ornamentation, style, verse, the approach to the reader, and polishing or emendatio. In each chapter or subchapter he defines the term as it was defined in ancient Rome (by Cicero, Quintilian, Horace, others) and generally understood by the Renaissance and gives examples of its importance for a variety of translation theorists. These latter do not appear in any particular historical order; as Rener assumes that all of the theorists he discusses over an eighteen-century period knew and accepted and applied this monolithic “system” in essentially the same way, he chooses his examples from a wide variety of theorists in different periods, based on whose words exemplify a given term or principle best.

And there is much to be said for this approach. Despite enormous historical and regional and other variation, there was a common set of assumptions about how language functioned and what that meant for translation, and those assumptions remained relatively stable over a long period of time. So deeply ingrained is this “system” in the Western mind, in fact, that it is difficult to eradicate its surviving traces in our thought about language even today, after a century of radical linguistic, cultural, and political assaults upon it. Even today it seems intuitively “right” to say that speakers and writers choose individual words, which they string together into coherent sentences, or to say that they first order words grammatically, then ornament that order rhetorically. Philosophically, these ideas have been thoroughly discredited; and yet they have taken such deep root in our collective intellectual “operating system,” as it were, that it often seems counterintuitive, even “unnatural,” to argue against them.

The cultural and intellectual hegemony of this “system” in the West has been one of my scholarly fascinations as well; in some sense the first half of The Translator’s Turn (Robinson 1991c) and all of Translation and Taboo (Robinson 1996b) were attempts to chart out the history of that system as well. What Rener can offer that my own work and that of other scholars cannot, however, is a minutely systematic account of the system, its specific formulations by specific writers, as they reflected both upon language in general and upon translation in particular. In contrast with Rener’s painstaking study, my own work in this area feels impatient, rushed; there is obviously much to be learned from his book.

EXCLUSION

There is, of course, a price to pay for all this unity: it is largely achieved at the expense of local difference and historical change, and, as Cheyfitz will show, of the political, cultural, and psychological impact of unification on those so unified. In his introduction Rener (1989, 7) announces his intention “to regard the sameness of the sources, the so-called ‘commonplaces,’ as something really common, i.e., shared by all translators regardless of their nationality or period in which they were active”— which is to say, to set aside everything that drops out of or deviates from this “commonality.” Obviously, any study of a complex field must idealize, simplify, reduce impossibly diverse phenomena to a few (or even a good many) simple representations; and any idealization must rely on the delimitation of differences and similarities. What goes with what, and what must be left out as irrelevant to this particular formulation? Rener is interested in what might be called the “center” of this system, and so he excludes the periphery from view: the people who didn’t fit in, who broke the rules, who deviated from the norm; the ways in which these norms and rules were taught and enforced, learned and internalized, resisted and rejected.

Noting the popularity of “theory” in the academy these days, for example, Rener attacks “the tendency of several scholars to use the word ‘theory’ in the plural. One is thus led to believe that translators followed not a generally accepted code but rather their own opinions or ‘theories’” (1989, 3). Implicit in this remark is an all-or-nothing universalism that harks back almost wistfully to the more extreme forms of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century classicism—indeed further, to twelfth- and thirteenth-century scholasticism: theory is either wholly unified or it is mere solipsistic opinion. But did all translators during Rener’s eighteen-century period follow a generally accepted code? What of the ones who didn’t? There is also a reificatory tendency to Rener’s systematizing that ignores all the interesting social questions that will exercise most of the theorists whose work I will be discussing. By what social, political, ideological channels were the precepts of this unified “system” developed, disseminated, inculcated, dogmatized?

One of the things this methodological insistence on unification and reification inevitably means is holes, omissions, excluded theorists, of course, and as Rener himself freely admits (9), there are many omissions even in as comprehensive a study as his. The obvious exclusion, from Cheyfitz’s viewpoint, would be the “colonized” in the broadest sense of that word: not only the “Indians” of both Asia and America who were colonized and displaced through translation but also the illiterate Western masses gradually “colonized” into universalized linguistic norms through hegemonic education.

Especially, for example, women: Rener does mention Anne Dacier (240), but only as a translator (and only as commented upon by Paul Mazon, as quoted in Edmond Cary), not as a translation theorist; he has not looked at her interesting sixty-page preface to her Iliad (1699). No other mentions of female translators or translation theorists appear in this “panoramic” view of eighteen centuries of translation theory: nothing about Elizabeth Tudor, the Cooke sisters (Anna Cooke Bacon, Mildred Cooke Cecil, Elizabeth Cooke Hoby, Katherine Cooke Killigrew), Margaret More Roper, Mary Sidney (Countess of Pembroke), Margaret Tyler, Suzanne de Vegerre, Katherine Phillips, Aphra Behn—though many of these are usefully anthologized in Travitsky’s Paradise of Women, and a growing body of feminist scholarship has been directed at their work.

This omission might seem strange in a study as exhaustive as Rener’s, were it not for the fact that the casual and “accidental” exclusion of women is one of the mainstays of the “classical” tradition Rener presents. The formal system he elucidates is steeped in the exclusion of women and other subaltern groups: wealth, social standing, and a classical education are essential to the proper functioning of the system, and until very recently (and still very largely) these have been and are all but systematically withheld from European women and peasants and the indigenous populations of foreign colonies. And the exclusion works so well that, even when women and other subaltern speakers come to voice in the period from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, they are not heard. Women simply did not write translation theory—thus goes the official history—until scientifically minded women such as Juliane House and Katharina Reiß and Justa Holz-Mänttäri in the 1970s and 1980s. The more radical female voices, from Margaret Tyler to Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz, are screened out.

Interestingly enough, so are medieval translators and translation theorists, the field Rita Copeland will so richly explore. Rener mentions a few medieval names in passing, notably King Alfred (63), Aelfric (98), John Scotus Eriugena and Robert Grosseteste (109), and Gregory the Great (128), but does not dwell on or recur to them, as he does with most sixteenth-century theorists. His conception of translation is by and large a Renaissance one, grounded ideologically in the power-and-theory consolidations of ancient Rome characteristic of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. But like his forebears in the Renaissance, he wants to claim universality for his system. The desired implication is that this is not one historically contingent conception of translation (even if it is limited to “only” eighteen centuries of European history), but the intrinsic nature of translation.

Hence the necessity of playing down the Middle Ages—not quite to the point of repressing their existence, as Rener by and large does with the women who have written about translation, but of assimilating them to earlier classical views and especially to the emergent recuperation of those views in the Renaissance. If his bibliography is any indication, Rener is largely unaware of the twentieth-century scholarship on medieval translation and translation theory, from Charles Homer Haskins to Guy Beaujolan, David C. Lindberg, Sebastian Brock, and Marie-Thérèse D’Alverny. The only source in this area that he cites is Werner Schwartz’s 1944 article (which also deals heavily with classical theories, making it possible to read it without attention to medieval theories), “The Meaning of Fidus Interpres in Medieval Translation”—though tellingly, he omits the last three words of that title in his bibliography.²

Partly this assimilation is a function of his dehistoricized perspective: he is, after all, intent on delineating a stable system, not on tracing the development of received wisdom over the centuries. But partly also it reflects the Renaissance conception of the Middle Ages as a great cultural void, a black night of ignorance broken only by a few shining lights of learning and intellect—which is to say, by those few scholars such as Roger Bacon whose work clearly points ahead to the Renaissance. This Renaissance modus operandi was, as Eric Cheyfitz would insist, itself a colonial attitude: an attempt to bring order to what is perceived as an indigenous cultural chaos with the imperial codes (legal and linguistic) of ancient Rome. Rener’s inclusions and exclusions continue the same project, organizing all relevant translation theories from his eighteen-century period into a naturalized system that comes to seem not so much forcibly imposed as commonsensical, pragmatic, and obvious to all right-thinking people. After all, every translator in every age faces the same problems: how to segment the source-language text (word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence), whether to rearrange syntactic sequences, whether to render nouns with nouns, verbs with verbs, and so on.

That Rener fails to problematize the political inculcation of this system—that he fails to move past mystified and ideologically naturalized technical problems to broader social problems of orthodoxy and heresy, inclusion and exclusion, intellectual and political power, persuasion and conversion—does not render his book useless. On the contrary: his book is the first comprehensive study of a system that did in fact exist in the period Rener studies. The book probably should have been written centuries ago—my own guess is that if Aristotle had written a treatise on translation, Rener’s approach would have been formulated extensively in the sixteenth century and frequently revised since—but that does not mean it should not have been written now. We need the systematic attention to detail he can provide.

The book also fairly hums with commitment, engagement—Rener’s intense identification with sixteenth-century humanism. This identification is at once the book’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. It charges Rener’s progress through his materials with urgency, but it traps that urgency in nostalgia. The book is above all an attempt to revive and restore to dignity a lost classicism, a sixteenth-century sense of the new possibilities stored up in classical civilization. We too have inherited this sense, of course, as part of the great Re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Foreword
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part 1: Remapping Rhetoric Grammar
• Part 2: Inside Systems
• Part 3: Embracing Foreign
• Conclusion: Neural Networks, Synchronicity, and Freedom
• Notes
• References
• Index