Philosophical Underpinnings: Pre/post-Kantian Views
Both claims are highly problematic in the rationalist regime of Western thought, especially (and increasingly) since the Renaissance. There is no rational model that would explain the power of a dead author (or of a living one who is distant in time and place and unconnected to translators either directly or through intermediaries--editors, agencies) to speak or generally initiate communication through a translator--or for that matter through anyone else. To the extent that we imagine authors, especially dead authors, as having the power to reach out to target audiences through the mediation of a translator, we are operating within a mystical model that has been under serious assault in the West for hundreds of years, perhaps even as many as two thousand years--and even if that model has not been entirely discredited or displaced, it is certainly way beyond the pale of credibility in an academic setting. Ditto the notion of readerly access to a writer's intentions: that has been considered a bogus claim at least since W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published their famous "Intentional Fallacy" essay in 1954. If we can't read our own spouse's mind, how can we claim to know what Dante or Homer was thinking hundreds or thousands of years ago? Rationally speaking, the claim to have access to a writer's intended meaning is, as Wimsatt and Beardsley insist, a fallacy. It can't be done. We only wish it could--and so pretend it can.
The rationalist models that have been developed in the past two or three decades to explain what is happening when we as readers think we're reading an author's mind are many, but most begin with the assumption of the constructive or constitutive activity of the reader. This is often called post-Kantian philosophy, since the German Idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant transformed philosophy two centuries ago by arguing persuasively that the Ding-an-sich or "thing in itself" or objective reality is ultimately unknowable by humans, and can only be constructed or constituted imaginatively by the understanding, which is prestructured to construct the world in certain ways. What we think of as reality, therefore, is not reality, not the Ding-an-sich, but a mental or "ideal" fiction that has whatever properties our "constitutive" understandings have assigned it.
The key literary-theoretical application of this notion in our own day might be reception or reader-response theory, for example Norman Holland's claim that all readers (re)create or (re)construct everything they read through their own experience, which is shaped powerfully by what Holland calls their "identity themes." Holland is both an English professor and a practicing Freudian psychoanalyst, and his thinking about readers of literature draws heavily upon Freudian thought: based on empirical experiments with students as respondents to literary texts, he argues that a reader with, say, an "oral" identity theme will tend to construct any given text in terms of oral, verbal, mouth- or eating-related imagery and thematics, while another student, with say a codependency identity theme, will tend to construct the exact same text as about people needing each other, relying on each other, sticking together through thick and thin, etc.
These readers may convince themselves that what they are finding in (or projecting onto) literary texts was actually put there by the author--or they may not. The conventional reification of more or less idiosyncratic interpretations as authorial intention is for Holland and other reception/reader-response theorists a social fiction, something we are taught to do by an intellectual tradition that used to believe in such things and still hasn't quite gotten out of the habit of acting on those beliefs--but not every reader puts that fiction into actual reading practice. Some readers do assume that what they see in a text is (must be) what the author intended for everyone to see there; others proudly declare their readings personal and idiosyncratic; still others construct self-consciously fictive images of the author and his or her intentions, never forgetting that those images are their own inventions, however heavily steeped they are in biographical research.
In any case, this rationalist reading paradigm views authorial intention as the unknowable Kantian Ding-an-sich; anything that is said about it must be treated as a lectorial construct. This is true even of the author's own pronouncements on his or her intentions: the author constructs coherent images of the intentions that undergirded his or her work only as a reader of that work, not as its godlike creator. Authorial intention is first the author's lectorial fiction, something the author invents in the course of reading what s/he has written, by way of explaining to herimself or others what s/he was doing while writing. Later, then, and neither more nor less reliably, it becomes the fiction of other readers, people who did not actually write the words down but who must be thought of as playing a crucial creative role in generating a significant text, in and through the act of reading it. In neither case is authorial intention what is really going on in the text; it is an imaginative construct, an explanatory model, an idealized image--first the author-as-reader's, then the reader-as-coauthor's--of the text as conceived, planned, and executed in a coherent and meaningful fashion in the mind of the author.
And this is all there is. This lectorial image is not a pale copy of reality; it is the only access we have to reality, a creative one, one that we ourselves generate imaginatively. In this post-Kantian framework what we are pleased to call "reality" only exists--at least for humans--in this fictional form, an illusion generated by our attempts to make sense of it. Authorial intention, supposedly the "true meaning" of a source text, is the byproduct of a reader reading.
Authors, then, are not the active initiators of communication who wield readers or translators as their passive and submissive and attentive instruments. They are the dead and/or distant screens onto which we project our constitutive readerly imaginations. The reader is active, and creates the author through a complexly personal projection. Readers and translators do not, in this post-Kantian model, "gain access" or "open themselves up" to an author's "true meaning"; rather, they themselves construct meaning-images that are more or less persuasive but never "true" or "false," "accurate" or "inaccurate."
Hence my incredulity when I started reading translation theory in the mid-eighties and found that almost everybody in the field--everybody but a few polysystems and translation studies people in the Low Countries and Israel, and a few action-oriented people in Germany--still believed in the pre-Kantian model, according to which the translator surrenders passively to the speaking of the original author. Where have these people been, I wondered. Two hundred years after Kant, and they're still plying the old platitudes that Kant supposedly demolished? In graduate school we had been told by the most exciting critical theorists on the faculty that it was virtually impossible these days to imagine what it must have been like to philosophize before Kant, so radically had he transformed philosophical thought. What a laugh! Here were dozens, hundreds of seemingly respectable scholars who found it quite easy to imagine a pre-Kantian approach to translation; indeed, who had apparently never heard of Kant, or been exposed to his "ubiquitous" and "inescapably dominant" philosophical radicalism; and who were thus proceeding blithely as if Kant had never existed--as if it was not only possible to know and be significantly guided by authorial intention, but essential. For these scholars, nothing else was translation. They could not imagine a conception of translation that deviated in the slightest from this pre-Kantian mentality that my professors in grad school had said was no longer even possible.
My first book on translation, The Translator's Turn, was by an large an assault on that mentality. I wanted to discredit it by tracing its historical roots in the dualism, instrumentalism, and perfectionism of the medieval church--by showing that it is (a) not "universal" or "natural" or "inherent" in translation but constructed, invented, the end result of a long historical process, (b) grounded in authoritarian ecclesiastical attempts to control Bible translators, (c) philosophically simple-minded (pre-Kantian), and (d) unrealistic, ungrounded in what translators actually do.
Interestingly, however, in the course of building my alternative, rationalist, demystificatory paradigm for translation studies, I struck off from the narrow path of rationalism in ways that left me too open to at least some of the charges I was bringing against what I was calling "mainstream" translation theory. The rationalist (often called the "enlightenment") model of human subjectivity posits a fully conscious, analytical self that assesses any given situation, considers the options for action as carefully and comprehensively as possible, makes a conscious and rational decision, and proceeds accordingly. Translators too are fully conscious professionals who proceed analytically in their work by first doing a painstaking textual analysis of the source text, then mapping that analysis semantically and syntactically onto the target language, and only then beginning to translate, referring throughout that process back to the analytical map they have charted out. I found this model a repressive and defensive idealization, a nervous Garden of Eden myth of rationality, a fiction designed to draw attention away from the great blooming (but for rationalists shameful) irrationality that governs so much of what we do. Much of the time (my main theme again in Becoming a Translator) translators translate more or less unconsciously, without conscious or analytical reflection; they get into a "zone," a reverie or fugue or "flow" state in which the words just "come to them" from somewhere and then "feel right" or "feel wrong" or "feel problematic" or whatever. They don't know why a specific rendition feels right or wrong; it just does. If it feels right, they will stick with it, even in the face of analytical nitpicking from editors or critics or their own rational minds. If it feels wrong, they will change it, but often without quite knowing what is wrong or what must be done to make it "read" or "scan" (=feel) better, or for that matter at what point in the editing process they have now actually improved it enough to move on.
My rationalist explanation of this "somatic response" to a text in The Translator's Turn was specifically that collective norms are inscribed on our bodies, specifically in our autonomic nervous systems--so that we feel that a certain word is "right" or "wrong" not because we are psychics or mystics but because our bodies have been conditioned or "inscribed" with regulatory ideological norms and conventions. This somatic or unanalytic or unconscious knowing is not mysticism, certainly not what I'm now wanting to explore under the rubric of spirit-channeling; it is a complex sociobiologically ("experientially") conditioned network of neural (electrochemical) events in our central and peripheral nervous systems, which transform collective norms into regulatory impulses for individual behavior. This is how we can be "moved" by black marks on a page, put there by authors who are often long dead; this is how authors seem to speak to us, to wield power over our emotions and actions, to wield us as their submissive tools or instruments. They tap into the somatic power of language, which exists not in some abstract intellectual realm called la langue but in the bodies of all the people who speak it, and which through the regulatory effects of the autonomic nervous system upon our behavior is able to make us do its (i.e., the society's) bidding. The ideosomatics of language is the voice of social mastery internalized in the workings of our own bodies; in opening ourselves up to somatic response, in slipping into that "zone" where translation is rapid and dreamlike, we are in fact opening ourselves up to ideological control.
Hence my irritation when Lawrence Venuti misread that book as advancing some sort of "biological mysticism" or "mystical biologism" (323)--as if I weren't talking about ideology! As if I weren't radically secularizing and problematizing the mystical model, submitting all of its claims to a rationalist regime! Because I did not see the translator as perfectly rational in the enlightenment mode, in complete analytical control of every translation decision, I was--must be!--slipping inexorably back into the muck of mysticism, a deplorably "reactionary" mode from Venuti's vantage point of scientific materialism. And here I thought I was taking Marxism one big step further: exploring the material (electrochemical) channels through which ideology actually regulates individuals' lives!
What I propose to do in this book, then, is to make it just a little easier for Lawrence Venuti and others to misunderstand me as some kind of mystic; to tweak the spiritualistic underpinnings of translation theory a little more overtly, with a little less of that kneejerk need to reduce mystical phenomena like spirit-channeling to tidy rationalistic explanations. In the terms I'll be using in this book, The Translator's Turn might be read as arguing that what the translator channels in that somatic or mediumistic "zone" is not discarnate spirits--the "true" voice and meaning of the source author--but ideology, the collective voice of the society. For how could the translator channel the actual original author? That's impossible. No one can do that; the very idea is a mere remnant of ancient superstitions.
Here I'm going to leave the door open just a bit wider to the possibility that translators channel not only ideology but--perhaps through ideology, I don't know--original authors as well. Is it just an illusion when I get the overwhelming sense that I know exactly what an author was trying to say? I get that sense so often when translating technical and commercial texts that I catch myself feeling annoyed when I don't get it--when the original makes so little sense to me that I become convinced that the author was an idiot who had no idea what s/he was trying to say.
Or, in the example I gave in The Translator's Turn (17), what exactly was going on when Diana derHovanessian sensed the word that the Armenian poet was reaching for and insisted on using it in her translation, even though her Armenian scholar/collaborator kept telling her that her word was completely wrong for what the poet had written? When she later met the poet, he told her that she was right and the scholar was wrong. That was the word he had been looking for; he just hadn't found it while writing the poem. How did she know?
Must we demystify this story, reduce it to a rationalist explanation, by arguing either that (a) the poet was just being nice to a foreign visitor and nothing of what he told her ever happened, or that (b) the poet was telling the truth as he saw it, but actually was merely being persuaded retroactively by the enthusiasm of his Armenian-American guest into actually believing that her word was the one he had been looking for?
I remain rationalist enough to gravitate uneasily in these demystificatory directions myself. I don't want spirit-channeling to be real. I don't want to believe that translators can channel the actual voices and meanings of long-dead authors. There is a part of me that does believe it--as I say, I even feel it sometimes, that sense that I know what the author is really trying to say from across the centuries, or across the intelligence or style gap--but I want to find a good rational explanation for that too. It's the lingering effects of an age-old superstition. It's the speaking within me, despite all my demystifications, of a still-dominant ideological norm for translation.
But why is it still dominant? Why do I hear so many translators and translation scholars repeating with great conviction these old chestnuts about letting the author speak through us, when by rights that premodern paradigm should have been dead and buried decades, even centuries ago? Are they just stupid, blind, unreflecting, theoretically unsophisticated slaves to outdated and discredited paradigms?
