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The Struggle for Legitimacy

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

10.1353/mln.2023.a922039

1080-6598

Brian James Baer,

Globalization and political ideologies

The Struggle for Legitimacy Brian James Baer In 1916, a short, anonymously authored article, "The Art of Translation," appeared in the New York Tribune. It begins by quoting Mme Lafayette, who compares a poor translator to a footman dispatched to deliver a message of great subtlety: "The more delicate the compliment, the more certain it is that the messenger will spoil it (2)." The author dismisses such disdain as grossly unfair: "[Translation] requires the rarest of gifts, of which thorough familiarity with two languages is but the beginning. It requires a sympathetic knowledge of two cultures, two perspectives, two attitudes toward life and their expression in art." After pointing to highly successful translations into English, such as the King James Bible and some translations of ancient Greek tragedy, the author arrives at the crux of the article, the translation of modern Russian literature: "In the here and now, all roads lead to Russia." While many asserted the untranslatability of Russian literature to justify poor quality translations, the author offers a simpler explanation: "The root of the matter lies not, however, so much in the difficulties, the requirements of the art, as in the low financial value placed on it by publishers." So, in the face of enduring disdain for the craft and despite claims of untranslatability, the author concludes, "That competent, conscientious, artistic translators can easily be found if the work is made worth their while is proved by Mrs. Garnett's English edition of Dostoevsky." The number of competent, conscientious, and artistic translators has grown exponentially in the century since. But popular prejudices against translation and translators persist because the impediments to changing the culture of translation are at once attitudinal and material, as the author above suggests. Moreover, the attitudinal and [End Page 1549] the material are entangled in mutually reinforcing ways, making the problem an especially thorny one: if translations are only ever pale copies of an original—or, in the words of nineteenth-century Sinologist Herbert Giles, "moonlight and water" where the originals are "sunlight and wine"—then why would publishers pay any more for them? And if translations are poorly remunerated, then why would someone with extensive training in languages and subject areas engage in this activity? Full-time academics, for whom remuneration is arguably less important than for full-time translators, must be allies in the struggle for fair compensation. At the same time, academics face persistent attitudinal disdain for translation as a legitimate form of scholarship, which has produced strong institutional disincentives, namely, the fact that translations count for little or nothing in the determination of tenure, promotion, and merit at most U.S. universities—despite the fact that many subjects could hardly be taught without the support of translations. How, then, do we address this institutional resistance? Clearly, it cannot be done through rhetoric alone. Moreover, we should not put departmental colleagues who may have never engaged with translation in theory or practice in the position of evaluating the quality of our translations. It would be extremely helpful, therefore, if scholar-translators could present third-party evaluations of their work, similar to peer reviews of scholarly articles (although peer review is another form of uncompensated academic labor that is in crisis). One solution could be to encourage more systematic feedback from publishers. I have often been asked to prepare a sample of a translation, which the publisher then evaluates before offering a contract; but I have never seen those evaluations, if they even exist in written form. If such evaluations could be formalized and presented to the translator along with the contract, this would provide important support in the struggle for academic recognition and legitimacy. This is also why it is crucial to cultivate a more sophisticated culture of reviewing translations, whether within the academy or for the general reading public—something that is addressed in the Manifesto. How can we argue for the importance of our work when our contribution has not even been mentioned in a review or when our names are not featured on the cover of the translation? Changing the culture of reviewing may, however, be among the most difficult challenges we face. A study I conducted on...