Douglas Robinson - The Experimental Translator

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My title, The Experimental Translator, is a provocation, of coursebut not an unprecedented one. In Where Is My Desire? Chantal Wright (2020) launched a similar provocation, insisting that Translation needs to be sexier. It needs to be more creative, more experimental; it needs an avant-garde. It needs to jam, and see what comes out in the wash.

I have taken these words to heartnot only here in this book but in the experimental translations that energize it.

Chantal Wright also directed me to Lily Robert-Foleys (2020) article The Politics of Experimental Translation, which draws on a half-century or more of translational experiments, and to the onslaught of monographs on this topic from Clive Scott, including at least Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (2012a), Translating the Perception of Text (2012b), and The Work of Literary Translation (2018), which harks back to the experimental writing of Apollinaire and Mallarm.

Those works might arguably impart a kind of inevitability to my topic and titleeven a kind of finality, as in what else could there possibly be to say?

But of course despite these provocations, translation at large in society remains at once subservient and sacrosanct. More precisely, the source text remains sacrosanct in its inimitable brilliance and what remains sacrosanct in its translation is only the subservient preservation (though with some unfortunate diminishment, sigh) of that brilliance. The translation is the handmaiden to brilliance; it has no claim to brilliance.

That last paragraph is of course the quasi-religious mythos of translation that the experimental provocateurs assaultand that mythos, precisely because it protects the sanctity of the great (literary) work of art, is itself well-protected.

In a 2014 review of Scott (2012a, b), for example, Adam Piette offers a somewhat grudging acceptance of the inventive experimentality that Scott champions, only pausing briefly to call this or that experimental translation an extraordinary mlange of text, environmental baggage, and white noise (425) or a mess (427) and then in his final paragraph gets right down to it:

This brings me to the crux of my problem with the two books: the concept experimental, though brave, colorful, theoretically lively, liberating in and of itself, is used in practice to forget the original in ways that do not foreground the textual, performative, or environmental processes/contexts of production so much as point towards the translator as master-juggler. (427)

Thats the crime: forget[ting] the original. Experimental translation as foregrounding the brilliance not of the source text but of the translator as master-juggler.

He goes on: This is not narcissistic, necessarily, but it takes a while to task oneself, let us say, not to think of Harold Bloom when the originals are defaced, scribbled over, and twisted from their original trajectories (427). Presumably what he means there by Harold Bloom is not the crabby old man resentfully bemoaning the usurpation of white male privilege by feminists and multiculturalists in The Western Canon (Bloom 1994; see Robinson 2017d: Chapter ) but the two anxiously influential little books of the mid-1970s, The Anxiety of Influence (1973) and A Map of Misprision (1975).

But see Sections 2426 of Chapter , below, for a close look at Jonathan Lethems (2007) retort to Bloom, The Ecstasy of Influencenot to mention the ()/kstasin gei(n) driving us out of ourselves of Longinus on the sublime. As I argue in Translator, Touretter: Avant-Garde Translation and the Touretter Sublime (Robinson Unpub.) that ecstatic experience of being driven out of oneself is one of the goals of the avant-gardeand of course the anxiety of that ecstasy that more conservative readers feel helps power the backlash against experimental translation.

A little more of that backlash from Piette:

Too much commentary on the translation procedure, and too little sensitivity to the speech act of the original, well, God knows the majority of books on translation theory are guilty of that. Yet here, the darker sides to experimental reworking of the speech of the other are too often glided over towards a celebratory model for the radical reworkings. (427)