Lawrence Venuti, Professor Emeritus of English at Temple University, USA, is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French, and Catalan. He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility (Translation Classics edition, 2018), The Scandals of Translation (1998), and Translation Changes Everything (2013) as well as the editor of Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses, Pedagogies (2017), all published by Routledge.

The Scandals of Translation

Routledge

Chapter One

HETEROGENEITY

Although the growth of the discipline called "translation studies" has beendescribed as "a success story of the 1980s" (Bassnett and Lefevere 1992: xi),the study of the history and theory of translation remains a backwater inthe academy. Among the English-speaking countries, this is perhaps mosttrue of the United States, where only a handful of graduate programs intranslator training and translation research have been instituted, andforeign-language departments continue to assign greater priority to the study ofliterature (literary history, theory, and criticism) than to translating,whether literary or technical (see Park 1993). Yet elsewhere as well, despitethe recent proliferation of centers and programs throughout the world (seeCaminade and Pym 1995), translation studies can only be described as emergent,not quite a discipline in its own right, more an interdiscipline that straddlesa range of fields depending on its particular institutional setting:linguistics, foreign languages, comparative literature, anthropology, amongothers.

This fragmentation might suggest that translation research is pursued witha great deal of scholarly openness and resistance against rigidlycompartmentalized thinking. But it has produced just the opposite effect.Indeed, translation hasn't become an academic success because it is beset by afragmentary array of theories, methodologies, and pedagogies, which, far frombeing commensurate, still submit to the institutional compartments ofintellectual labor (now adjusted to admit translation). The prevalent approachescan be divided -- loosely but without too much conceptual violence -- intoa linguistics-based orientation, aiming to construct an empirical science, andan aesthetics-based orientation that emphasizes the cultural and politicalvalues informing translation practice and research (see Baker 1996; cf. Robyns1994: 424-425).

This theoretical division is reflected, for example, in Routledge's recentpublishing in translation studies. In the early 1990s, these books werepublished in two different areas, each with its own commissioning editor,catalogue, and audience: "linguistics and language studies" and "literary andcultural studies." The potential market seemed so divided that Routledgecut back its translation studies series (whose general editors then left toinitiate a similar series with Multilingual Matters Ltd). Currently, Routledgeshrewdly aims to counter the fragmentation of the field by assigning thecommissioning responsibilities to the linguistics editor, who is pursuing moreinterdisciplinary projects. Yet this international publisher, at once academicand commercial, remains unique. In English, and no doubt in other languages,translation studies tend to be published by small presses, whether trade oruniversity, for a limited, primarily academic readership, with most sales madeto research libraries. Splintered into narrow constituencies by disciplinaryboundaries, translation is hardly starting new trends in scholarly publishingor setting agendas in scholarly debate.

This current predicament embarrasses translation studies by suggesting thatit is suffering, to some extent, from a self-inflicted marginality. With rareexceptions, scholars have been reluctant to negotiate areas of agreement andto engage more deeply with the cultural, political, and institutional problemsposed by translation (for an exception see Hatim and Mason 1997). And soa critical assessment of the competing theoretical orientations, an account oftheir advances and limitations, seems in order. As a translator and studentof translation, I can evaluate them only as an interested party, one who hasfound cultural studies a most productive approach, but who remains unwillingto abandon the archive and the collection of empirical data (how couldstudies be cultural without them?). My main interest in the theories lies intheir impact on the methodological fragmentation that characterizes translationresearch and keeps translation in the margins of cultural discourse,both in and out of the academy. The question that most concerns me iswhether theorists are capable of bringing translation to the attention of alarger audience -- larger, that is, than the relatively limited ones to whichthe competing theories seem addressed. This question of audience in factguides my own theory and practice of translation, which are premised onthe irreducible heterogeneity of linguistic and cultural situations. To assessthe current state of the discipline, then, and to make intelligible myassessment, I must begin with a manifesto of sorts, a statement of why and howI translate.

Writing a minor literature

As an American translator of literary texts I devise and execute my projectswith a distinctive set of theoretical assumptions about language and textuality.Perhaps the most crucial is that language is never simply an instrument ofcommunication employed by an individual according to a system of rules -- evenif communication is undoubtedly among the functions that language canperform. Following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), I rather see language as acollective force, an assemblage of forms that constitute a semiotic regime.Circulating among diverse cultural constituencies and social institutions, theseforms are positioned hierarchically, with the standard dialect in dominance butsubject to constant variation from regional or group dialects, jargons, clichésand slogans, stylistic innovations, nonce words, and the sheer accumulation ofprevious uses. Any language use is thus a site of power relationships becausea language, at any historical moment, is a specific conjuncture of a majorform holding sway over minor variables. Lecercle (1990) calls them the"remainder." The linguistic variations released by the remainder do not merelyexceed any communicative act, but frustrate any effort to formulate systematicrules. The remainder subverts the major form by revealing it to be sociallyand historically situated, by staging "the return within language of thecontradictions and struggles that make up the social" and by containing as well"the anticipation of future ones" (Lecercle 1990: 182).

A literary text, then, can never simply express the author's intendedmeaning in a personal style. It rather puts to work collective forms in whichthe author may indeed have a psychological investment, but which by theirvery nature depersonalize and destabilize meaning. Although literature canbe defined as writing created especially to release the remainder, it is thestylistically innovative text that makes the most striking intervention into alinguistic conjuncture by exposing the contradictory conditions of the standarddialect, the literary canon, the dominant culture, the major language.Because ordinary language is always a multiplicity of past and present forms,a "diachrony-within-synchrony" (Lecercle 1990: 201-208), a text can be nomore than "a synchronic unity of structurally contradictory or heterogeneouselements, generic patterns and discourses" (Jameson 1981: 141). Certainliterary texts increase this radical heterogeneity by submitting the majorlanguage to constant variation, forcing it to become minor, delegitimizing,deterritorializing, alienating it. For Deleuze and Guattari such texts composea minor literature, whose "authors are foreigners in their own tongue" (1987:105). In releasing the remainder, a minor literature indicates where the majorlanguage is foreign to itself.

It is this evocation of the foreign that attracts me to minor literatures inmy translation projects. I prefer to translate foreign texts that possessminority status in their cultures, a marginal position in their nativecanons -- or that, in translation, can be useful in minoritizing the standarddialect and dominant cultural forms in American English. This preference stemspartly from a political agenda that is broadly democratic: an opposition to theglobal hegemony of English. The economic and political ascendancy of the UnitedStates has reduced foreign languages and cultures to minorities in relationto its language and culture. English is the most translated language worldwide,but one of the least translated into (Venuti 1995a: 12-14), a situationthat identifies translating as a potential site of variation.

To shake the regime of English, a translator must be strategic both inselecting foreign texts and in developing discourses to translate them. Foreigntexts can be chosen to redress patterns of unequal cultural exchange and torestore foreign literatures excluded by the standard dialect, by literarycanons, or by ethnic stereotypes in the United States (or in the other majorEnglish-speaking country, the United Kingdom). At the same time, translationdiscourses can be developed to exploit the multiplicity and polychrony ofAmerican English, "conquer[ing] the major language in order to delineatein it as yet unknown minor languages" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 105).Foreign texts that are stylistically innovative invite the English-languagetranslator to create sociolects striated with various dialects, registers andstyles, inventing a collective assemblage that questions the seeming unity ofstandard English. The aim of minoritizing translation is "never to acquire themajority," never to erect a new standard or to establish a new canon, but ratherto promote cultural innovation as well as the understanding of culturaldifference by proliferating the variables within English: "the minority is thebecoming of everybody" (ibid.: 106, 105).

My preference for minoritizing translation also issues from an ethical stancethat recognizes the asymmetrical relations in any translation project.Translating can never simply be communication between equals because itis fundamentally ethnocentric. Most literary projects are initiated in thedomestic culture, where a foreign text is selected to satisfy different tastesfrom those that motivated its composition and reception in its native culture.And the very function of translating is assimilation, the inscription of aforeign text with domestic intelligibilities and interests. I follow Berman(1992: 4-5; cf. his revision in 1995: 93-94) in suspecting any literarytranslation that mystifies this inevitable domestication as an untroubledcommunicative act. Good translation is demystifying: it manifests in its ownlanguage the foreignness of the foreign text (Berman 1985: 89).

This manifestation can occur through the selection of a text whose formand theme deviate from domestic literary canons. But its most decisiveoccurrence depends on introducing variations that alienate the domestic languageand, since they are domestic, reveal the translation to be in fact atranslation, distinct from the text it replaces. Good translation isminoritizing: it releases the remainder by cultivating a heterogeneousdiscourse, opening up the standard dialect and literary canons to what isforeign to themselves, to the substandard and the marginal. This does not meanconceiving of a minor language as merely a dialect, which might wind upregionalizing or ghettoizing the foreign text, identifying it too narrowly witha specific cultural constituency -- even though certain foreign texts anddomestic conjunctures might well call for a narrow social focus (e.g. Québecduring the 1960s and 1970s, when canonical European drama was translated intojoual, the working-class dialect, to create a national Québecoistheater: see Brisset 1990). The point is rather to use a number of minorityelements whereby "one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming"(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 106). This translation ethics does not so muchprevent the assimilation of the foreign text as aim to signify the autonomousexistence of that text behind (yet by means of) the assimilative process of thetranslation.

Insofar as minoritizing translation relies on discursive hetereogeneity, itpursues an experimentalism that would seem to narrow its audience andcontradict the democratic agenda I have sketched. Experimental formdemands a high aesthetic mode of appreciation, the critical detachment andeducated competence associated with the cultural elite, whereas thecommunicative function of language is emphasized by the popular aesthetic, whichdemands that literary form be not only immediately intelligible, needing nospecial cultural expertise, but also transparent, sufficiently realistic toinvite vicarious participation (Bourdieu 1984: 4-5, 32-33; cf. Cawelti 1976,Radway 1984, Dudovitz 1990).

Yet translation that takes a popular approach to the foreign text isn'tnecessarily democratic. The popular aesthetic requires fluent translations thatproduce the illusory effect of transparency, and this means adhering to thecurrent standard dialect while avoiding any dialect, register, or style thatcalls attention to words as words and therefore preempts the reader'sidentification. As a result, fluent translation may enable a foreign text toengage a mass readership, even a text from an excluded foreign literature, andthereby initiate a significant canon reformation. But such a translationsimultaneously reinforces the major language and its many other linguistic andcultural exclusions while masking the inscription of domestic values. Fluency isassimilationist, presenting to domestic readers a realistic representationinflected with their own codes and ideologies as if it were an immediateencounter with a foreign text and culture.

The heterogeneous discourse of minoritizing translation resists thisassimilationist ethic by signifying the linguistic and cultural differences ofthe text -- within the major language. The heterogeneity needn't be soalienating as to frustrate a popular approach completely; if the remainder isreleased at significant points in a translation that is generally readable, thereader's participation will be disrupted only momentarily. Moreover, a strategicuse of minority elements can remain intelligible to a wide range of readers andso increase the possibility that the translation will cross the boundariesbetween cultural constituencies, even if it comes to signify different meaningsin different groups. A minoritizing translator can draw on the conventionalizedlanguage of popular culture, "the patter of comedians, of radio announcers,of disc jockeys" (Lecercle 1988: 37), to render a foreign text that might beregarded as elite literature in a seamlessly fluent translation. This strategywould address both popular and elite readerships by defamiliarizing thedomestic mass media as well as the domestic canon for the foreign literature.Minoritizing translation can thus be considered an intervention into thecontemporary public sphere, in which electronic forms of communicationdriven by economic interest have fragmented cultural consumption anddebate. If "the public is split apart into minorities of specialists who puttheir reason to use non-publicly and the great mass of consumers whosereceptiveness is public but uncritical" (Habermas 1989: 175), then translatingshould seek to invent a minor language that cuts across cultural divisionsand hierarchies. The goal is ultimately to alter reading patterns, compellinga not unpleasurable recognition of translation among constituencies who,while possessing different cultural values, nonetheless share a long-standingunwillingness to recognize it.

A minoritizing project

I was able to explore and test these theoretical assumptions in recenttranslations involving the nineteenth-century Italian writer I.U. Tarchetti(1839-69). From the start the attraction was his minority status, both in hisown time and now. A member of a Milanese bohemian subculture calledthe "scapigliatura" (from "scapigliato," meaning "dishevelled"), Tarchettisought to unsettle the standard Tuscan dialect by using it to write in marginalliterary genres: whereas the dominant fictional discourse in Italy was thesentimental realism of Alessandro Manzoni's historical novel, I promessisposi (The Betrothed), Tarchetti favored the Gothic tale and theexperimental realism of French novelists like Flaubert and Zola (Venuti 1995a:160-161). The Italian standards against which Tarchetti revolted were not justlinguistic and literary, but moral and political as well: whereas Manzoniposited a Christian providentialism, recommending conjugal love and resignedsubmission before the status quo, Tarchetti aimed to shock the Italianbourgeoisie, rejecting good sense and decency to explore dream and insanity,violence and aberrant sexuality, flouting social convention and imaginingfantastic worlds where social inequity was exposed and challenged. He wasadmired by his contemporaries and, amid the cultural nationalism thatcharacterized newly unified Italy, was soon admitted to the canon of thenational literature. Yet even if canonical he has remained a minor figure: hereceives abbreviated, sometimes dismissive treatment in the standard manuals ofliterary history, and his work fails to resurface in the most provocativedebates in Italian writing today.

A translation project involving Tarchetti, I realized, would have aminoritizing impact in English. His writing was capable of unsettling reigningdomestic values by moving between cultural constituencies. In FantasticTales (1992) I chose to translate a selection of his work in the Gothic, agenre that has both elite and popular traditions. Initially a middlebrowliterature in Britain (Ann Radcliffe), the Gothic was adopted by many canonicalwriters (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier) and has sinceundergone various revivals, some satisfying a highbrow interest in formalrefinement (Eudora Welty, Patrick McGrath), others offering the popular pleasureof sympathetic identification (Anne Rice, Stephen King). Importing Tarchettiwould cast these traditions and trends in a new light. It would also challengethe canon of nineteenth-century Italian fiction in English, long dominatedby Manzoni and Giuseppe Verga, the two major realists. Although Italy isa recurrent motif in the Gothic, Fantastic Tales was the firstappearance in English of the first Gothic writer in Italian.

Tarchetti wrote other texts that were equally flexible in their potentialappeal. Under the title Passion (1994) I translated his novel Fosca,which mixes romantic melodrama with realism in an experiment variouslysuggestive of Madame Bovary and Thérèse Raquin. In EnglishFosca promised to straddle readerships as a rediscovered classic and asa historical romance, a foreign wrinkle on the bodice ripper. Yet as I wastranslating the Italian text I also learned that Tarchetti's novel hadmetamorphosed into a "tie-in," the source of an adaptation in a popular form:Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Broadway musical Passion (1994).Suddenly, a canonical Italian text, which in English might be expected tointerest mainly an elite audience, was destined to have a much widercirculation.

What especially attracted me to Tarchetti's writing was its impact on thevery act of translating: it invited the development of a translation discoursethat submitted the standard dialect of English to continual variation. Fromthe beginning I determined that archaism would be useful in indicating thetemporal remoteness of the Italian texts, their emergence in a differentcultural situation at a different historical moment. Yet any archaism had ofcourse to be drawn from the history of English, had to signify in a currentEnglish-language situation, and would therefore release a distinctive literaryremainder. With Fantastic Tales I assimilated the Italian texts to theGothic tradition in British and American literature, modeling my syntax andlexicon on the prose of such writers as Mary Shelley and Poe, ransacking theirworks for words and phrases that might be incorporated in the translation. Thisis not to say that accuracy was sacrificed for readability and literary effect,but that insofar as any translating produces a domestic remainder, addingeffects that work only in the domestic language and literature, I made an effortto focus them on a specific genre in English literary history. In minoritizingtranslation, the choice of strategies depends on the period, genre, and styleof the foreign text in relation to the domestic literature and the domesticreaderships for which the translation is written (cf. the translation ethic of"respect" in Berman 1995: 92-94).

My version in fact follows the Italian quite closely, often resorting tocalque renderings to secure a suitably archaic form of English. This excerptfrom Tarchetti's tale, "Un osso di morto" ("A Dead Man's Bone"), is typical:

Nel 1855, domiciliatomi a Pavia, m'era allo studio del disegno inuna scuola privata di quella città; e dopo alcuni mesi di soggiorno aveva stretto relazione con certo Federico M. che era professore di patologia e di clinica per l'insegnamento universitario, e che morì di apoplessia fulminante pochi mesi dopo che lo aveva conosciuto. Era un uomo amantissimo delle scienze, della sua in particolare -- aveva virtù e doti di mente non comuni -- senonché come tutti gli anatomisti ed i clinici in genere, era scettico profondamente e inguaribilmente -- lo era per convinzione, né io potei mai indurlo alle mie credenze, per quanto mi vi adoprassi nelle discussioni appassionate e calorose che avevamo ogni giorno a questo riguardo.

(Tarchetti 1977: 65)

In 1855, having taken up residence at Pavia, I devoted myself to the study of drawing at a private school in that city; and several months into my sojourn, I developed a close friendship with a certain Federico M., a professor of pathology and clinical medicine who taught at the university and died of severe apoplexy a few months after I became acquainted with him. He was very fond of the sciences and of his own in particular -- he was gifted with extraordinary mental powers -- except that, like all anatomists and doctors generally, he was profoundly and incurably skeptical. He was so by conviction, nor could I ever induce him to accept my beliefs, no matter how much I endeavored in the impassioned, heated discussions we had every day on this point.

(Venuti 1992: 79)

The archaism in the English passage is partly a result of its close adherence tothe Italian, to Tarchetti's suspended sentence construction and his perioddiction ("soggiorno," "apoplessia," "indurlo" are calqued: "sojourn,""apoplexy," "induce him"). In other cases, when a choice presented itself I tookthe archaism over current usage: for "né io potei mai," I used the invertedconstruction "nor could I ever" instead of the more fluent "and I could never";for "per quanto mi vi adoprassi," I preferred the slightly antique formality of"no matter how much I endeavored" instead of a modern colloquialism, "no matterhow hard I tried."

The translation discourse of Fantastic Tales deviates noticeably fromcurrent standard English, yet not so much as to be incomprehensible to mostcontemporary readers. This was evident in the reception. I tried to shapereaders' responses in an introductory essay that alerted them to theminoritizing strategy. The reviews made clear, however, that the archaism alsoregistered in the reading experience, and not only by situating Tarchetti'stales in the remote past, but by implicitly comparing them to English-languageGothic and thus establishing their uniqueness. Most importantly, the archaismcalled attention to the translation as a translation without unpleasurablydisrupting the reading experience. The Village Voice noticed the"atmospheric wording of the translations" (Shulman 1992), while The NewYorker remarked that the "translation distills a gothic style never heardbefore, a mixture of Northern shadows and Southern shimmer" (1992: 119).

Such reviews suggest that the formal experiment in the translation wasmost keenly appreciated by the cultural elite, readers with a literaryeducation, if not academics with a specialist's interest. Yet FantasticTales also appealed to other constituencies, including fans of horrorwriting who are widely read in the Gothic tradition. A reviewer for the popularGothic magazine, Necrofile, concluded that the book "is not so veryesoteric that it has nothing to offer the casual reader," adding that "theconnoisseur will undoubtedly be grateful for `Bouvard' and `The Fated,'" twotales that he felt distinguished Tarchetti as a "contributor to the richtradition of nineteenth-century fantasy" (Stableford 1993: 6).

Tarchetti's Fosca encouraged a more heterogeneous translationdiscourse because he pushed his peculiar romanticism to an alienating extreme,making the novel at once serious and parodic, participatory and subversive. Theplot hinges on a triangle of erotic intrigue: the narrator Giorgio, a militaryofficer engaged in an adulterous affair with the robust Clara, develops apathological obsession with his commander's cousin, the repulsively emaciatedFosca, a hysteric who falls desperately in love with him. The themes of illicitlove, disease, female beauty and ugliness, the pairing of the bourgeois ideal ofdomesticated femininity with the vampire-like femme fatale -- these familiarconventions of the romantic macabre again prompted me to assimilate theItalian text to nineteenth-century British literature, and I fashioned anEnglish style from related novels like Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights(1847) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Yet to match the emotional extravaganceof Tarchetti's novel, I made the strain of archaism more extensive and denser,still comprehensible to a wide spectrum of contemporary American readersyet undoubtedly enhancing the strangeness of the translation. The theoreticalpoint here is that the strategies developed in minoritizing translationdepend fundamentally on the translator's interpretation of the foreign text.And this interpretation always looks in two directions, since it is both attunedto the specifically literary qualities of that text and constrained by anassessment of the domestic readerships the translator hopes to reach, a sense oftheir expectations and knowledge (of linguistic forms, literary traditions,cultural references).

I imagined my readership as primarily American, so the effect of strangenesscould also be obtained through Britishisms. I used British spellings("demeanour," "enamoured," "apologised," "offence," "ensure"), even aBritish pronunciation: "a herb" instead of the American "an herb," a choicethat provoked an exasperated query from the publisher's copyeditor, "Whatcan you mean by this?" (Venuti 1994: 33, 95, 108, 157, 188, 22). Somearchaisms resulted from calque renderings: "in tal guisa" became "in suchguise"; "voler far le beffe della mia sconfitta," which in modern Englishmight be translated as "wanting to make fun of my defeat," became "wantingto jest at my discomfiture"; "addio" became "adieu" instead of "goodbye";and where Tarchetti's Rousseau-influenced thinking led him to write "amorproprio," I reverted to the French: "amour propre" (Tarchetti 1971: 140,151, 148, 60; Venuti 1994: 146, 157, 154, 60). I adopted syntactical inversionscharacteristic of nineteenth-century English: "Mi basta di segnare qui alcuneepoche" ("It was enough for me to note down a few periods [of my life]here") became "Suffice it for me to record a few episodes" (Tarchetti 1971:122; Venuti 1994: 128). And I seized every opportunity to insert an antiqueword or phrase: "abbandonato" ("abandoned") became "forsaken"; "da cui"("from which") became "whence"; "dirò quasi" ("I should almost say")became "I daresay"; "fingere" ("deceive") became "dissemble"; "fu indarno"("it was useless") became "my efforts were unavailing," a sentence lifteddirectly from Stoker's Dracula (Tarchetti 1971: 31, 90, 108, 134; Venuti1994: 31, 92, 109, 140).

The more excessive archaism worked to historicize the translation, signalingthe nineteenth-century origins of the Italian text. Yet to indicate the elementof near-parody in Tarchetti's romanticism, I increased the heterogeneityof the translation discourse by mixing more recent usages, both standard andcolloquial, some distinctly American. Occasionally, the various lexiconsappeared in the same sentence. I translated "Egli non è altro che un barattiere,un cavaliere d'industria, una cattivo soggetto" ("He is nothing more than aswindler, an adventurer, a bad person") as "He is nothing but an embezzler, acon artist, a scapegrace," combining a modern American colloquialism ("conartist") with a British archaism ("scapegrace") that was used in novels by SirWalter Scott, William Thackeray, George Meredith (Tarchetti 1971: 106;Venuti 1994: 110; OED). This technique immerses the reader in a worldthat is noticeably distant in time, but nonetheless affecting in contemporaryterms -- and without losing the awareness that the prose is over the top.

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