The Fiction of the Translator

Abstract

Prompted by a reading of two novels by contemporary Italian writer Francesca Duranti, La casa sul lago della luna (1984) and Sogni mancini (1997), in which the experiences of translators and writer-translators are explored in depth, this paper investigates fictional treatments of the translator by a number of contemporary writers from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The paper considers how fiction writers place the translator centre stage, and emphasise both the function of translation as a form of intercultural communication and the alterity implicit in the concept of translation. It is argued that representations of translators in contemporary fiction reflect crucial issues of (cultural) identity in a globalised society, in which displacement is a widespread phenomenon.

Keywords:

• Displacement
• Fiction
• Identity
• Narrative
• Self
• Translator

Notes

1. My translation of: “Il problema del tradurre è in realtà il problema stesso dello scrivere e il traduttore ne sta al centro, forse ancor più dell'autore. […] Il traduttore è l'ultimo, vero cavaliere errante della letteratura” (Fruttero and Lucentini 60).

2. In a recent essay, Carol Maier argues that by “probing the often unsettling effect of translation on translators, fiction writers might offer a contribution to translation theory that has been overlooked in translation studies” (163).

3. In this passage from Walter Benjamin's well-known essay, “The Task of the Translator”, “Fortleben” points to an unbroken continuum in time where original and translation live forever intertwined, a situation which, Benjamin adds, “should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity” (71).

4. See Kristal Invisible Work. Borges and Translation.

5. Indeed, Fabrizio embodies the notion of the “discourse of delirium”: “Delirium is a discourse which has supposedly strayed from a presumed reality. The speaking subject is presumed to have known an object, a relationship, an experience that he is henceforth incapable of reconstituting accurately. Why? Because the knowing subject is also a desiring subject, and the paths of desire snarl up the paths of knowledge […]. This dynamic of delirium recalls the constitution of the dream or the phantasm” (Kristeva “Psychoanalysis and the Polis” 307).

6. “instead of having to create what will enable him to equal his ideal – a work, or an idealized object to love – Narcissus will fabricate an ersatz” (Tales of Love 126).

7. Venuti argues that when Anglo-European culture promoted fluency – the removal of all traces of “foreignness” – as the highest value to which a translation could aspire in the nineteenth century, a necessary requirement for the production of such a “domesticated” text was for the translator to be “invisible” (see Translator's Invisibility 61 and passim).

8. Venuti deals extensively with this topic in The Scandals of Translation (programmatically subtitled Towards an Ethics of Difference). He argues that the search for transparency, for the “fluent” text, expresses itself through strategies of familiarisation/domestication implying processes of elision and of forced transformation that erase difference by imposing dominant ideologies.

9. Notably the five books which make up the Hermes series (see in particular Serres Hermès I, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, and The Troubadour of Knowledge ).

10. Laure Angestelle portrays a character caught between cultures, at a place Brossard alludes to as the Angststelle or “place of anxiety”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rita Wilson

Rita Wilson coordinates the postgraduate Translation Studies program in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. Her research interests include contemporary Italian literature, women's writing, translation and intercultural studies. She is the author of Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women's Narrative (Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2000) and co-editor of Spaces and Crossings. Essays on Literature and Culture from Africa and Beyond (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001) and Across Genres, Generations, and Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2004)