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Translation as Academic Ecology

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 138; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2023.a922046

1080-6598

Marguerite Feitlowitz,

Translation Studies and Practices

Translation as Academic Ecology Marguerite Feitlowitz In 2023, the practice of literary translation remains marginalized in the academy. We call on universities to abandon this prejudice by ceasing to undervalue literary translation as a form of rigorous scholarship and creative endeavor and to give more weight to translation in hiring and tenure and promotion cases. –2023 PEN Manifesto on Literary Translation These are fighting words—well aimed, well timed, and integrated with the Manifesto's theme of cultural ecology. Let's think about that ecology within the framework of the academy. In translation inquiry, research, listening, watching, synthesizing, and creating are all entwined. Translation is an ecosystem, ideal for awakening and sustaining collaboration across disciplines. In translating, we probe the far reaches of our curiosity, we travel beyond our own minds and lived experiences to meet others—authors, epochs, places documented on, or erased from—maps of the universe. Translation shows us how intricate our personal ecology already is, and how deep and rich it might become. Translation is an inherently social act (even when you're working with a dead author). Translation is also a political act—in our choice of what to translate, we manifest our affinities and allegiances. Transforming a text from one language into another complicates our conceptions of reading, comprehending, and writing. These complications stretch across disciplines. Multi-disciplinary modes and methods [End Page 1590] abet the fruitful dismantling of our assumptions about "knowledge," "meaning" and their reservoirs. Translation is a way of plumbing textual depths, of making visible not only the shared networks between languages, places, histories, words, and forms, but also that which resists translation. A frustrating dead end? No: such resistance helps break down traditional hierarchies of language. Languages-within-languages, dialects, sociolects, regionalisms all come with distinctive reservoirs of history, politics, embedded codes. To read, interrogate, gloss, or translate any text, we must be aware of such linguistic dynamics. Translators know this. It is an explicit part of our work. This is one reason translation and translation studies should infuse a myriad of disciplines, areas of scholarship and creativity where, perhaps, these considerations of subterranean linguistic dynamics appear more subtly embedded or have been traditionally considered tangential. The history of the world can be told in part through the history of translation. What texts get translated, and when, by whom, for what (political/religious/cultural) purpose? To cite just one massively transforming example: When the Han Dynasty wanted to understand Buddhism, they relied on, and lavishly supported, teams of translators. Today translation is an essential consideration in multiple streams of Cultural Theory, Migration Studies, Diasporic Studies, Colonial/Post-Colonial Studies, Afro-Futurism, Trans-Pacific cultural production, and much more. The languages and literatures of European former colonial powers have been enriched (even revolutionized) by writers from territories they once controlled. These developments make it necessary for colleges and universities to center rather than marginalize translation. Translation is both a "specialized form of writing," as the Manifesto says, and a multivalent form of scholarship. ________ I have been deeply fortunate to spend most of my teaching career at Bennington College, an institution founded in 1932 on the principle of parity among the humanities, arts, and sciences. Perhaps surprisingly, translation has always had a home at this small, rather isolated campus in rural Vermont. Wallace Fowlie, the pioneering scholar of French literature, taught at the college in two stints, 1935-41 and 1949-1962. While at Bennington, Fowlie translated Mallarmé and Rimbaud (he would be the first to render Rimbaud's Complete Works into English); he also edited and translated a collection of mid-20th-century French poets, introduced American readers to surrealism in [End Page 1591] a landmark essay, edited a bilingual collection of French short stories, and much besides. In 1943, poet and faculty member Theodore Weiss and his wife Renée Weiss founded The Quarterly Review of Literature, which featured translations of works ranging from Dostoyevsky to Rilke to Sartre to contemporary poets from Asia and Latin America. In his fifty years at Bennington (1938-1988) the poet Ben Belitt published numerous landmark (if sometimes controversially mannered) translations of works by Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guill...