Toward a Rethinking of Retranslation

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Notes

1. Here literary is understood in the broad sense to include texts in the humanities in opposition to practically oriented technical, legal, or medical texts such as treaties, instruction manuals, pharmaceutical lists of ingredients, indications, and side-effects, etc.

2. See in particular, Antoine Berman’s early but much-quoted article, “La Retraduction comme espace de traduction,” Yves Gambier’s “La Retraduction, retour et detour,” Paloposki’s article “Originality and the Defence of Translation” (2004), Paloposki and Koskinen’s “Reprocessing Texts, The Fine Line Between Retranslating and Revising” (2010) about the corpus of retranslations in Finland, Chapters 5 and 6 of Susam-Sarajeva’s Theories on the Move about translation’s role in the circulation of literary theories, especially the retranslations of French structuralist texts into Turkish and of French feminist texts into English, and Chapter X of Henri Meschonnic’s Ethique et politique du traduire.

3. For a list of the major reasons for retranslations, see Gambier, “La Retraduction,” 415.

4. Chesterman, “A Causal Model for Translation Studies.”

5. Of course, this is not to say that the material conditions of a retranslation are irrelevant. On the contrary, beyond conceptual questions of lack and gain, the reasons why retranslations are commissioned and by whom, the ways in which they are subsidized, marketed and reviewed would need to be studied as well.

6. Berman, “La Retraduction comme espace de traduction,” 5.

7. Paloposki and Koskinen, “Reprocessing Texts,” 28.

8. Bensimon, “Présentation,“ ix.

9. Rodriguez, “Sous le signe de Mercure, la retraduction,” 65, 68.

10. Venuti, “Retranslations,” 28.

11. Ibid., 29, 32.

12. Venuti, “Translation, History, Narrative,” 815.

13. Collombat, “Le XXIe siècle,” 10, 9.

14. Ibid., 11.

15. Vanderschelden, “Why Retranslate the French Classics?,” 1.

16. Ibid., 9.

17. Quoted in ibid., 2.

18. Ibid., 9.

19. Quoted in ibid., 17.

20. Brisset, “Retraduire ou le corps changeant de la connaissance,” 41.

21. Ibid., 42.

22. Ibid., 45. Brisset points out that the Origin of Species, for instance, saw sixteen editions during Darwin’s own lifetime and that 75 percent of the “text” was revised several times.

23. Ibid., 44.

24. Ranciere, quoted in Culler, “Introduction,” 905.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 906.

27. See Massardier-Kenney’s discussion in “Translation Theory and Its Usefulness.”

28. Attridge, “Introduction,” 4. The critical explanation of meaning can happen by focusing on an origin (this can be done through a variety of paths: biographical, historical, socioeconomic, or psychoanalytic), or on a goal (aesthetic, moral, spiritual, political, and so forth).

29. Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” 51.

30. Attridge, 16.

31. Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” 52.

32. Ibid., 68.

33. Goethe, “Translations,” 62.

34. Culler, “Introduction,” 906.

35. Brownlie, ““Narrative Theory and Retranslation Theory,” 167.

36. Ibid., 166.

37. Deane-Cox, Retranslation, 127.

38. Quoted in Canavaggio, “Retraduire Don Quichotte pour la Pléiade,” 156

39. Ibid., 157

40. Although he does not quote Eugene Nida, this retranslator might have thought that, “Live languages are constantly changing and stylistic preferences undergo continual modifications. Thus a translation acceptable in one period is often quite unacceptable at a later time” (Nida, “Principles of Correspondence,” 146).

41. Canavaggio, “Retraduire Don Quichotte pour la Pléiade,” 160.

42. Kahn and Seth, “Avant-propos: une fois ne suffit pas,” 7.

43. Bernstein, Attack of the Difficult Poem, 162.

44. Meschonnic, Ethics and Politics of Translating, 52.

45. Cavanagh, “The Art of Losing,” 234.

46. Ibid., 235.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.

49. It is a 19-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. Poets.org offers a detailed description: “The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines.” Stephen Fry also discusses the form extensively in Chapter VI of his Ode Less Travelled. Suffice it to say that its present appeal seems to lie in the importance of repetition, which embodies the pattern of gain and loss to which Cavanagh refers, and which Stephen Fry calls the “ironic reiteration of pain” (The Ode Less Travelled, 228).

50. It argues that unlike the chaotic world of Greek Gods who meddle with the life of human beings, this is a world that has an internal order rather than one imposed from the outside. Specifically, it addresses the reasons why things change and accounts for changes in beings in the world by referring to an indefinite, a principle that generates opposites such as hot and cold. See Kahn, Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology..

51. Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” 18.

52. Ibid., 19, 28.

53. Ibid., 20.

54. Ibid., 19; my emphasis.

55. Ibid., 19.

56. Meschonnic, Ethics and Politics of Translating, 52.

57. Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” 42.

58. “ … along the lines of usage; for they let order and thereby also reck belong to one another (in the surmounting) of disorder” (Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” 57). Nietzsche’s version reads, “Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time” (13); Diels’, “But where things have their origin, there too their passing away occurs according to necessity; for they pay recompense and penalty to one another for their recklessness, according to firmly established time” (13).

59. Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” 57.

60. For a discussion of Heidegger’s translation into German and of David Krell’s translation of the “Anaximander Fragment” into English, see Venuti, The Scandals of Translation, 120–22.

61. Nida, “Principles of Correspondence,” 146.

62. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 73.

63. Kahn and Seth, “Avant-propos,” 7.

64. Deane-Cox, Retranslation, 190.

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Notes on contributors

Françoise Massardier-Kenney

Françoise Massardier-Kenney is Director of the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Kent State University, and administers BS through PhD programs in translation. She has translated works of fiction from nineteenth-century authors (Sand, Staël, Duras). Her most recent translations include the novel Valvèdre by George Sand (2007) and Towards a Translation Criticism by Antoine Berman. She is also the author of articles on translation and French culture and literature, and the co-author of Translating Slavery. Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783–1823 . She is the General Editor of the American Translation Association Scholarly Translation Series and co-editor of the journal George Sand Studies. She teaches graduate courses in literary translation, research and writing methods for translators, a legal and commercial translation and cross-cultural competency.