03/04 Reading Responses - Kevin Hauger

 Nabokov: Letters to the American Translator

What a joy to read, especially Nabokov's report of The Atlantic's receipt of "Cloud, Castle, Lake": "'we are enchanted etc. this is genius, this is what we have been looking for etc. we want to print it at once,' and give us more."

This collaboration exemplifies, to me, the merit of a "literal translation," even if such a thing is only a concept and not an achievable end. Approaching the text with as impartial a hand as possible (as Profs. Maurer and Elliott have done with the assignment trots) seems like a productive first step, even if the final text majorly departs from that first pass.

Authority in Literary Translation: Collaborating with the Author

Is anyone else exhausted with Foucault and Barthes, or at least the irony of citing them as authorities when deconstructing authority?

I think it's not always accurate to say that subordination to an author's intent is "due to a common assumption that the author knows best, associated with a natural feeling of reverence toward the person of the author." To me, it seems less a matter of reverence than of accuracy; if a text is delimited at all ("you are reading x book by y author, translated by z"), that delimitation ought to signify something. If the point of translation were in fact to proliferate meanings without a real attempt at reflecting the original text's meaning, I think we'd be better off writing essays. 

And I see much more egoism in this Barthes quote: "to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that, to furnish it with a final signifier, to close the writing," than in any authorial intervention. For whom does it close the writing? People without the capacity for critical thinking?

Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote

The two translations we read of this story both seemed to have the object in mind of translating a sort of pompous tone, so it was cool to see their different strategies in action. The more obvious discrepancies make me curious about what drove each translator's decision-making (e.g. italicizing the adjective versus the noun in the first sentence, or writing that Menard mastered 17th c. Spanish versus Castilian).